Nail it with Lowe's!

our site!
the output

Inspiration

Amishi's dad is always up to new home DIY projects. Whether it's minor tweaking or building an entirely new space, planning out a DIY can be pretty difficult. Finding the right materials and staying within budget can be overwhelming, especially for first-time DIYers. With Nail It with Lowe's, we wanted to make a program that can simplify that process.

What it does

Nail It with Lowe's takes in a user's dream DIY project--say a bookshelf--and provides the user a list of materials from Lowe's, their costs, and a step-by-step tutorial to accomplish their goal.

How we built it

Our backend coding, which involved querying Chat GPT and scraping data from Lowe's API, was initially done in Python. We converted our code to JavaScript. Our frontend coding was done in React.

Challenges we ran into

This project was a steep learning curve for all of us. Three of us are COMP110 students, and one of us had never coded. For all of us, this was also our first hackathon. We came in without any conception of how to collaborate on a coding project--struggling to set up React, commit to GitHub, install different packages. Things got to a slow start as everyone acclimated to the world of coding. We taught ourselves everything from scratch--from using APIs and integrating Chat GPT into our program to creating a domain and coding in JavaScript. Going to workshops helped demystify abstract concepts and the mentors were extremely helpful and patient in fixing our devices, pointing out what had gone wrong, and explaining how everything fit together.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our website turned out stunning thanks primarily to Reiyah--the logo on the website links to the Lowe's site. Amishi's web-scraping of the Lowe's site was critical to our project and the integration of Chat GPT to our functionality also helped.

What we learned

We developed a foundational understanding of API's, how they work, and how to use them. We learned about how Github and collaboration works. We also practiced coding in JavaScript and Python as well as using the openai package.

What's next for Nail it with Lowe's?

We would like to learn to create a more sophisticated AI model for this purpose rather than relying on pre-existing models for our information. We would also like to have a more interactive user experience where the user can specify more things about their DIY project so that we can offer them more accurate estimations and tutorials.