PaperIDE

Inspiration

Our team is composed of two hackathon first timers and two experienced hackers. We wanted to try a realistic project that would let us experiment with many technologies. We were interested by optical character recognition and inspired by the premise of a fun but useless hack.

What it does

PaperIDE redefines the way you think about programming. It (barely) requires you to use your computer, allowing you to focus more on the programming task at hand. You write your code on paper (in any language), and use the web app to take a picture (the compilation step). PaperIDE compiles your code and returns the output through sound. It also prompts you to use voice commands to provide console input.

How we built it

We used django to make a web app that is hosted on a laptop and interfaces with the ChatGPT API, but reachable on a mobile phone with ngrok.

Challenges we ran into

The original plan was to use Tesseract for OCR, but the quality of the output was not satisfactory so we pivoted to using ChatGPT instead.

What we learned

This project made us discover the use of django as a comprehensive bundle for making a web app, as well as the combination of a front-end and background process.

What's next for PaperIDE

The base of the project is nearly complete, but further optimizations with voice commands will improve user experience.

Built With

• azure
• chatgpt
• css
• django
• html
• javascript