Inspiration
Food is something we all need. Sometimes as a college student I feel like there is no time to cook or find a recipe, let alone get the ingredients for that recipe. The idea is to make cooking more efficient by using what you already have in your fridge and pantry to make a delicious recipe instead of having another bowl of cereal.
What it does
It takes a photo upload or text input sends that to Gemini API and gives you 3 to 5 recipes based on the ingredients detected in the photo or text.
How we built it
We started by making a flowchart with eraser.io to organize tasks and a shared github to have version control. Then we made a flask app using python so we could test the the api calls with our gemini api key. We used the flowchart to know which buttons we needed to include in the html css and js. We then moved the python from terminal to this html page we made. We made a static version on github but you can't make dynamic api calls through a github pages hosted site so we left it local.
Challenges we ran into
Some of the challenges we ran into involved github, flask, and having a larger team. With github most of the team hadn't used it before so just getting it organized with our own branches and making sure we weren't having merge issues brought up various bugs and issues. Running the flask app was complicated to set up because we were testing it with the terminal and gemini documentation, but it had a lot of routing issues. with a 5 person team making sure everyone feels like they have a task was difficult. delegating tasks and making sure people weren't working on the same code was challenging and brought up bugs. It made us think how huge teams stay organized on larger projects.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're really proud for pushing through after losing code to github bugs and discouraging error messages. We're really proud of staying organized in a project where it's easy to get lost in the api calls and making the. Lastly working together as a team to make a working project is something we're all proud of.
What we learned
We learned a lot about api calls and using git. we originally planned to use a recipe api after using gemini api to analyze the ingredients in the photo or prompts.
What's next for Photo Recipe Maker
If we were to continue developing Recipe Maker, we would enhance it by adding several bonus features. First, we would introduce a tool that tracks macronutrient statistics based on the quantities of ingredients used in each recipe. We would also like to implement a recommendation feature that suggests similar or new recipes based on a user’s past creations and commonly used ingredients. In addition, the app could track expiration dates and leftover ingredients to help reduce waste. To support these features, users would create a personal profile that allows the app to maintain a running tally of their data. Finally, with user profiles in place, we could add a social component that lets users share recipes and connect with others.
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