Pixelity

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Inspiration

How many of you have an old smart phone lying around? Phones that can't seem to keep up with modern requirements. Pixelity allows you to make good use of it with a single click.

What it does

Pixelity allows you to sign up and use your old phone as a network attached storage, like your own personal cloud. This allows the user to backup all their pictures privately on their own old phone. Our project requires no setup, it is ready out of the box and is easy for laymen to use.

How we built it

We built the web interface with React+Typescript+Next.js and hosted it on Vercel. The mobile app is made using the React Native library, based off of our web interface.

Challenges we ran into

Initially we decided to use the Go+HTMX stack to make our project. The main issue we ran into was the fact the go mobile, which would have allowed us to compile to apk was deprecated. Due to which we had to pivot to using Next.js and React Native with Vercel hosting. There was also an issue with the POST method in the React Native app which proved to be rather finicky.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Given the limited time we had, the team really pulled out all the stops. We were able to have a fully functioning MVP at the end of the hackathon which did more than what was our initial prediction. Also React Native was a new technology for all of us. We found it a joy to work with and are proud of what we have achieved with it.

What we learned

We learnt that a careful study should be performed of the the tech stack before getting bogged down in development. This would help us to determine if our stack will let us achieve our projects goals efficiently

What's next for Pixelity

We had 2 main directions in mind that we can explore in the future.

Using AI models to implement facial recognition and image tagging to improve the search functionality of our app.
Adding sharding capability. Currently our project allows one user to use one phone as a storage server. With sharding we can allow one user to have multiple devices as a part of their storage network.
We can also implement a RAID array configuration to have a robust system once sharding and multiple devices are supported.
While we would like to continue as an open source project, we can add the RAID array feature in a paid feature in order to monetize the project.