HomeChef

Thank you to Julio Hernandez, Akhila Murella, and Sarah Fallah for being on the project with us. Special thanks to ASU Soda, University of Arizona, and mentors for making this event possible.

Inspiration

As college students, we rarely have a fully-stacked fridge—but this doesn't have to limit our eating options! To promote a diverse and healthy diet, we wanted to create an app that would allow users to input ingredients they currently have and display a list of recipes they can cook without making trips to the grocery store.

What it does

Our app is currently just a demo in it's beginning stages. We want to be able to take a list of ingredients from the user, and given that, return recipes that only use the ingredients they have. One we get their list of ingredients, we will display a list of recipes. By clicking on the recipe, we will take them to a page within our app that displays the ingredients needed, instructions, prep time, and more. We also want a settings page for users to store common ingredients that they almost always have, to avoid repeated-checking everyday. The settings page will allow the user to configure what foods will always be checked.

How we built it

We built this app using Swift on Xcode and Spoonacular's food-api (https://spoonacular.com/food-api).

Challenges we ran into

Being beginners in Swift-programming, we found a lot of roadblocks, particularly with integrating the API. None of us have had to import an API before, and one of our team members have never even used Xcode. For our members without a mac, it was particularly difficult to configure an OSX environment on their PCs using Virtualbox. Not only was the end environment laggy, the setup took a lot of time and troubleshooting. It was a huge learning experience, but thanks to the online-coding-community and helpful mentors and fellow hackers, we were able to pull off this demo!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very happy that we were able to upload a submission given our lack of expertise and limited time! Though our app is far from it's final, ideal form, it's an honor to share our idea with the hacking community. Throughout the hackathon, many mentors and hackers praised our idea and expressed how useful HomeChef would be in their lives. To know that our app, once just an idea, could become a reality that improves the lives of other people, is truly rewarding.

What we learned

As Aaron Matos said before HackArizona began, "every failure is just another opportunity." Although we did not complete the perfect app (but then again, who does on their first try?), we learned to be okay with failure (for success will surely follow!), step out of our comfort zone, go big with our ideas, and the significance of collaboration. In addition, we gained a lot of technical knowledge in APIs, Swift and Xcode, Objective-C and much more!