InstaCook

Inspiration

Daily, people have a hard time going outside, because of this pandemic. The situation is horrendous day by day. Some people have a hard time to buy food items due to the low stock at stores, limited store timings, and restrictions of going out. One day, I and my family almost ran out of food, especially vegetables. My mom had 2 vegetables and was lost on what dish to make with just 2 vegetables. It took a while to decide and we did not had many recipes to choose. Well, this inspired us to build an application which will suggest more recipe option with just 2 or 3 vegetables, which I thought it will be beneficial for people during this pandemic.

What InstaCook does?

Our project aims to find a combination of recipes based on the 3 vegetables the user enters, and henceforth does a web-wide recipe search and displays the URL choices, which are done using Python and its libraries. For example, if a user enters three vegetables: Tomato, Carrot, and beans, you will be given the URLs of the recipes of those vegetables.

How we built InstaCook?

Using Python and its libraries, I used GUI and Web Scraping. The GUI (Graphical User InterFace) is an important part of my project, providing ways for the user to input his/her vegetables and display the results - which is the URLs of the different recipes. I used Web Scraping, especially Beautiful Soup to retrieve the URLs.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge we faced were that Python libraries, especially web scraping modules, were compatible with the different MacOs versions, which took a while to get that working. Another challenge was comprehending the Web Scraping modules and its functions, and integrating to the main program of my program. Other minor challenges that we faced were predicaments related to python, IDE(Integrated Development Environment) and MacOS versions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were glad of finding a software solution to a predicament most will face, during situations like this pandemic and other natural calamities. We would be more happy to see if this application aids more people to find a good recipe for them.

What we have learned?

We have learned a lot about Web Scraping. Additionally, we acknowledged more about Python and its integration with some of its modules/libraries.

What's next for InstaCook?

The future steps or further development is to provide more options of vegetables for the user to enter, ability to save the results in to database, retrieve the previous searched recipes, and provide more information along with URLs of recipes