Greenboard

Inspiration

In order to make recycling more fun, we thought it would be interesting to add a competitive aspect to it. Something that could get you with friends fighting for the top spot in recycling to win a prize at the end of the month, letting the user win twice by once redeeming the coupons in any convenience store for actual cash, and also giving them a chance at winning by submitting the coupon in the leaderboard.

What it does

GreenBoard is a leaderboard that shows the number of recycling coupons you have deposited. By depositing more coupons, your leaderboard rank increases, thereby the chance of you getting the prize at the end of the month.

How we built it

We built it with Flask on the backend, and React Native for the mobile application on the front end.

Challenges we ran into

German convenience stores do not have a one-size-fits-all solution for barcodes that are used to scan the coupons. Some use Aztec code, an older format rarely supported by open-source software, and some use regular QR codes or even barcodes that you would see on the back of an everyday item. We had to find a way to make this work by using React Native's packages and OpenCV on the backend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud to have gamified something as simple as recycling with Greenboard, as well as finding solutions together on the technical issues that we found most difficult by coming up with new ideas to tackle them.

What we learned

We learned how to build a back-end using Flask, and we learned how to build a mobile application in React native. We tried our hand at computer vision using opencv's python bindings as well.