RecycleMe

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Inspiration

Some people normally don't return their bottles because they think it is not large amount of money. We made this app to help people to see how much they can make just by saving then bringing the bottles to local bottle depots. Our app can calculate how much money you can get back for different types of bottles and cans.

Here's what we did

We used Microsoft's Custom Vision AI to determine which kind of bottle/can it is and display the cost depending on their size. We gathered pictures from internet to help the AI to distinguish the different types of bottles/cans. We also created our own API to retrieve data after the AI tells us what kind of bottle/can it is. Google Maps is intergrated into the app so users can locate their nearest local bottle depot.

Formidable challenges

For some of us, this is our first hackathon. We walked into Uvic not knowing much about what's to come. Brainstorming ideas was a challenge with out lack of experience, but with the help of some great people, we were able to come to a conclusion. Version control was also causing some issues, we had conflicts we had to deal with and that took a lot of our time.

Training out Microsoft Custom Vision for Recyclable items was a challenge. We spent a good amount of time training the Vision and it still felt as if the accuracy could be better. Getting the AI to determine the differences between bottles and cans was really difficult. Sometimes the AI would look at colors and sometimes it would look for shapes, the AI gave wrong output a lot of the times.

What we've accomplished

We successfully completed our first hackathon as a team.

Our Custom Vision works as intended and our application feels clean.

The Vision AI and our API communicates really quickly so that the user doesn't have to wait so long.

Google Maps API locates all the local bottle depots so that the user can find the nearest one to go to.

We made the UX/UI really simple so that everyone can easily use it. We did this so that the users don't have to search the website to find the necessary information.

User can just simply point the camera at the bottle/can and it will display the cost of the bottle/can.

Our 20 hour Journey

It was a great experience. Coming all the way to UVIC from BCIT was a long travel, but it was worth it. We learned a lot and we accomplished a lot. It is always good to face challenges. Challenges helped us to assist one another and built our teamwork.