picascii

the team, ascii-fied
the team

Inspiration

Squirrel!

And also, we thought ASCII art was super fun, so we wanted a way to convert any picture to an ASCII picture. Do things like this exist already? Of course, probably. But are they convenient and easy-to-use? Are they lightweight but also fancy schmancy? Are they of good quality? Are they charismatic??

Our goal is to incorporate all of that into one neat package. We present:

         __                                                 __     __
        /\_\                                               /\_\   /\_\
 ______ \/_/_     ______     ______     ______     ______  \/_/_  \/_/_
/\  __ \  /\ \   /\  ___\   /\____ \   /\  ___\   /\  ___\   /\ \   /\ \   
\ \ \_\ \ \ \ \  \ \ \____  \/\  __ \  \ \___  \  \ \ \____  \ \ \  \ \ \  
 \ \  ___\ \ \_\  \ \_____\  \ \_____\  \/\_____\  \ \_____\  \ \_\  \ \_\ 
  \ \ \__/  \/_/   \/_____/   \/_____/   \/_____/   \/_____/   \/_/   \/_/ 
   \ \_\                                   BY JOCALEXRYEM
    \/_/

What it does

It converts a given image file into ASCII art! The user has the option to either pick an existing image or take a picture with the camera, then either save it as a .txt or a .jpg. Videos can also be uploaded and converted to ASCII videos.

How we built it

In python.

Challenges we ran into

accounting for line spacing while doing the ASCII conversion
slow computation time (for video conversion)
working out webcam shenanigans
connecting all the pieces together as the code got longer
documentation
an attempt to make this a mobile app through expo, but decided not to for our mental health.