It's Canadian, Eh?

Our home page!
Scanning barcodes

Inspiration

We were saddened hearing the news about the tariffs that are about to strike us. To prepare ourselves and discover our inner Canadian spirit, we have decided that buying Canadian products instead of other countries' would be a great way of supporting our community.

What it does

It's Canadian, Eh?" has two main functionalities. The first is a barcode scanner that identifies your product, determines if it is Canadian, and gives you Canadian alternatives if it is not. The second is a LLM that allows you to inquire about general topics related to Canadian products.

How we built it

We built this webapp using nextjs, building react components and making many api calls. To name a few major components in our backend:

Barcode scanner uses Quagga, JS plugin that works across different platforms to parse the barcode from the video streamed from the user's camera.
Product identification uses the barcodelookup API, it takes the barcode number and tells us all the relevant product information.
LLM we used is Gemini. We make API calls to it to identify the country of origin of the product, suggest alternatives, and respond to the user's prompts in general.

Challenges we ran into

Next.js's server and client side architecture was particularly troublesome for us, especially since we don't have a lot of experience with it. Sometime we would think the code works but because some part is in client side in a server sided function, it gives us errors. Luckily after mentors' help and reading through documentations, we have learnt the way to properly use our components.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of completing the project in such a tight deadline. We were feeling pretty strong against the tariffs which prompted us to work harder (and maybe pull all-nighters).