SimplyPC

Inspiration

When building/purchasing one’s first PC, many people are often overwhelmed and confused with the many technological terms. Searching for the specs online can be very time consuming and can also return conflicting results. This leads to them buying PCs that are not suited for their needs, causing them to waste money.

What it does

We hope to simplify the process of selecting components and assembling a PC based on their needs. This is through a recommendation system and PC building simulator. We also wish to create a community where people can showcase their builds as an example to other people.

How we built it

We first created a Figma design on how the entire webpage will flow and then an ER diagram for our database structure which we then inserted into Supabase for cloud storage. We also applied the use of ThreeJs to create the 3d models of actual computer components for our pc builder. Then using svelte and nestjs as our front and backend framework respectively, we created our webpage tying it all together.

Challenges we ran into

We faced many challenges such as having to learn all about data structure, frontend and backend frameworks and JS within a span of 3 months. providing us with a very steep learning curve to work with. This is especially the case where we are unaware of the minor details we may have unintentionally created along the way that may cause bugs in the future to arise. In addition, When we were gathering data through webscraping, one major issue we found was that it could lead our ip address getting banned due to bot detection. Furthermore, as we scraped the entire database of the website, some components such as ram has a lot of similar, yet slight differentiating factors which causes the data scraped to be vry huge. When we were cleaning up and splitting the data as a csv, it would lead to files crashing due to the large number of rows.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are able to get our entire website running and the 3d models working together with our frontend and backend.

What we learned

We learnt the importance of the nitty gritty details such as securing your API keys and passwords safely as well as setting a proper naming convention for everyone to use.

What's next for HEAP

We plan to carry the knowledge we have obtained through this experience and apply to our future webapp projects and not repeating the same mistakes we have committed while embarking on this project.