Gryph Planner

Don't like reading course outlines? We got you. Gryph Planner scans and analyses your course outlines and extracts important dates allowing you to quickly import them into Google Calendar.

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Inspiration

Sometimes Course Outlines can present you with too much information at once, and having to scan it for important information to enter into your calendar is a very boring task that we thought we could automate.

What it does

Gryph Planner lets our users send in their course outlines as PDFs, which are then sent over to Gemini AI which scans it for important dates for Assignments, Tests and Exams and formats it into a .csv file, which the user can then seamlessly import to their Google Calendar with the click of a button.

How we built it

We built Gryph Planner with a React frontend and an Express.js backend. The backend handles the file uploads using Multer, parses the PDF content with pdf-parse, and sends the extracted text to Google's Gemini AI API so it can scan it for important dates and events. These dates and events are then formatted as a CSV file or pushed directly to the user's Google Calendar using OAuth2 authentication and the Google Calendar API. The frontend communicates with the backend through REST APIs.

Challenges we ran into

Figuring out how to use React

This was the first time any of us had used React, so it took a while for things to get going since we spent most of the first few hours just figuring out syntax and how React actually works.

Turning the PDF file into text

To turn the users' PDF files into text we used pdf-parser, we struggled for a while to get it working because there were some problems with how we were importing it and we spent a long time looking up how to fix it online.

Google Calendar API

Using Google's API is a very challenging thing to do for a beginner and it was the first time any of us had tried interacting with any of their APIs, so it took several hours for us to figure out how to add events to Google Calendar using our website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In the end, I feel that we managed to make a project that we're all very proud of, the main accomplishments within the projects for us were:

  • The integration with Google's Calendar API, this was the main thing for us as this is what makes our website so convenient for users to use.
  • How we managed to figure out React in such a little amount of time.
  • How we worked so well as a team and how we communicated with each other was also a big deal in this project as it allowed us to set tasks and goals to keep us organized and on the ball.

What we learned

Through this project we learned a lot about working with React, dealing with APIs, designing good UI and how to work with Google's APIs.

What's next for Gryph Planner

One thing we tried to implement, but didn't quite have time for was an AI chat bot that appears after the user uploads their course outline so that the user can ask it any questions about the content of it. Another thing we think would be awesome if we added would be support for Outlook Calendar, and other calendar services so that we can help as many people as possible.

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