smoot

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Inspiration

As engineering students, we are faced with numbers of all sorts. They are often very large or very small numbers, sometimes so extreme that they get blown out of proportion. We wanted to design a tool to help put these numbers into perspective by providing a physical relationship between the values we calculate and the sizes we know. For example, an arbitrarily large magnitude like 17 million kilometers might be better understood in the context of galaxy size. Smoot is a length visualization tool designed to help make numbers more relatable.

What it does

Smoot parses lengths in writing and converts them to meters. These are then processed and placed in a scaled graphical popup that puts lengths in perspective.

How I built it

Using Python for the backend coupled with an SQL database we provide data for the frontend written in javascript.

Challenges I ran into

Integrating the backend and the frontend was significantly challenging since we had no previous experience with it. Testing with google cloud services was useful but had a steeper learning curve than intended