Pico Lingo

• 

  logo

• 

• 

• 

• 

Inspiration Learning a language felt disconnected from my daily life because I couldn't bridge the gap between textbooks and the objects around me. I realized that manually Google translating every item in my room was a tedious hassle that killed my momentum.

What it does Pico Lingo is a "word cam" that turns your physical environment into a cozy, pixel-art collection of study cards. You simply snap a photo of an object to receive a custom Polaroid containing its translation, a clever mnemonic, and grammar details.

How I built it The app uses a computer vision layer to detect and outline multiple objects in a single frame for the user to "collect." I integrated Claude to handle the pedagogical heavy lifting by generating context-rich memory tricks and example sentences for every card.

Challenges I ran into One of the biggest challenges i faced was integrating the Anthropic API in a production (Vercel) environment. While everything worked perfectly during local development, deployment introduced a critical issue: all API requests failed with a generic "Connection error" (Anthropic SDK’s APIConnectionError), without any clear diagnostic information.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of I successfully created a cohesive, nostalgic visual identity as a solo developer. It was incredibly rewarding to see a standard smartphone photo transform into a stylized, functional learning tool that feels like a physical hobby.

What's next for Pico Lingo I plan to add a "Social Album" where users can see how people in different countries name and describe similar objects. I am also looking into a "Scavenger Hunt" mode that challenges users to find specific items in their neighborhood to level up.

Built With

• claudecode
• css
• svg
• typescript