Inspiration
As freshmen and now sophomores with dining hall plans, meal planning has always been a struggle. We often make last-minute decisions we are later unhappy with, leading us to think about how we can better plan. So, we decided to come up with a centralized platform where people can create schedules from both dining hall and restaurant meals, factoring in deals and nutritional info for a more personalized and tailored feel.
What it does
Allows students to "meal-plan" with dining halls and restaurants on campus based off of inputs regarding budget and nutrition.
How we built it
We used a FARM stack, using FastApi for the backend, React.js for the frontend, and MongoDB for the database. For scraping data, we used python scripts and beautiful-soup/selenium, converting these results into json for MongoDB.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into the problem of how restaurant menus are not standardized, so scraping them for information was not as simple of a process as expected. Though this could have been streamlined with a yelp api, we had trouble acquiring one, so a workaround solution was necessary. To solve the problem of standardization, we introduced an AI component to parse the menus, getting vital information while estimating non-explicit values.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that, despite our data acquisition roadblock, we were able to create a product with the bare functionality, creating a template for implementing future plans as well. Furthermore, we are happy that the project's functionality is something we have built, rather than heavily relying on an API to do most of the heavy lifting.
What we learned
We learned a lot about both the technologies we used and the problem itself over the course of this project. We mainly gained experience with setting up and using MongoDB Atlas, learning how to feed data into it and then manipulating it for the purposes we needed. We also collectively bettered our frontend, webscraping, and deployment knowledge, all skills we were hoping to improve over the course of the project.
What's next for GreenBack
Since we had to scale down the idea, there is a lot of room for improvement. Making it mobile, adding in more nutrition and dietary restriction options, having a social media aspect to encourage people to post and discover new pop-ups for free food or deals, and a home page for a tailored welcome.
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