SmartScraps Radar

An AI-powered tracking radar that identifies local food waste hotspots, helping businesses seamlessly redirect surplus food to communities in need and significantly reduce landfill emissions.

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Inspiration

Everyday, large amounts of perfectly consumable food are thrown away, while many people/communities struggle to get food. We wanted to create a solution that could help reduce food waste, which is bad for the environment, while making it easier for businesses to donate extra food to organizations that need it. This inspired us to build SmartScraps Radar.

What it does

SmartScraps Radar businesses find better ways to handle surplus food instead of throwing it away. The users enter information about the amount of food and the location and the air analyses to recommend nearby food, banks, shelters or other organizations. The website also shows the positive environmental impact of reducing food waste.

How we built it

First we came up with a plan for our website and drew out how we wanted it to look. Since we lack proper coding experienced, we used Base 44 to code the website for us. We tested the website with various forms of data to make it easier for the user to use. Through testing, we changed certain aspects to make it more accurate and easier to navigate through. All of the images in our website were either hand drawn or AI generated to include more customization. Finally, we reset all our test data and ran it for our demo, with the help of a representative from a local food bank Hands Of Hope

Challenges we ran into

In regard to the website, we very confused on how to create it, keeping in mind that we had very little coding experience. Once we discovered Base 44, we had to learn how to structure our prompts to ensure the results were exactly as we expected it to be. This process took a significant amount of time and various test datasets. Finally, once the website was designed we wanted it to be realistic and understand its effectiveness for someone who does this on a regular basis. For this, we reached out to a local food bank in our area, Hands Of Hope, where a representative helped us test it. Due to the time constraints, we lacked a suitable donor, so we had to enact that portion to ensure we cold clearly understand how everything would work when implemented. Once we were satisfied, we finalized our demo video. Ensuring the video was within the given time limit was challenging, but we managed to include the most important aspects and made it a few seconds over the 5 minute mark.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we created a project that addresses both food, waste, and food in availability to many people. We successfully built a working website that uses AI to support the community. We’re also proud of including humans for important food safety decisions.

What we learned

Through this project, we learn how AI can be applied to solve real world problems and we also gained experience working with GitHub and other designing platforms. We also learn the importance of bouncing the AI with human oversight.

What's next for SmartScraps Radar

In the future, we would like to connect the website with real food bank databases and add features such as image recognition for food items and donation pick up scheduling. We also hope to expand this AI so I can support more communities and reduce even more food waste.

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