Spare Swap

A platform for college students to share and discover project parts, with an AI assistant that suggests what you need and connects you to peers so you can build smarter, faster, and together.

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Inspiration 💡

As an engineering student, finding parts for a project can be the most cumbersome and expensive step of development. On other common marketplaces, it's easy to spend hours scrolling through hundreds of listings, trying to find the exact component you need at an affordable price and at a nearby location. At the same time, there are countless students who have spare parts from old projects - parts that have been collecting dust in their dorms, labs, and offices. SpareSwap bridges that gap by providing a convenient, quick, and free platform for students to find new parts and offload old ones.

What it does 🎯

SpareSwap makes it simple for Purdue students to share and find spare components. Students can create listings to donate parts they no longer need, while others can browse the home page or search for specific items. A built-in messaging system allows students to request parts directly from the listing creator and coordinate pickup details with ease. To take it a step further, SpareSwap also features an AI Assistant. Students can describe their project idea, and the assistant will search the SpareSwap database to recommend parts that could help bring their idea to life.

How we built it 🛠️

  • Structured a PostgreSQL database in Supabase with row-level security to protect user data
  • Crafted a React + Tailwind CSS frontend for a clean, student-friendly interface
  • Set up Supabase Auth to handle secure sign-ins and personalized dashboards
  • Connected GPT to generate part suggestions tailored to project descriptions
  • Added real-time chat so students can coordinate directly with one another
  • Brought everything together into a fully deployed, end-to-end platform

Challenges we ran into 🚧

  • Wrestling with Liveshare setup, which stalled collaboration early on
  • Fine-tuning Supabase RLS policies so access rules worked exactly as intended
  • Handling live updates in chat without lag or message duplication
  • Forcing GPT to consistently return clean, valid JSON outputs we could parse reliably

Accomplishments that we’re proud of 🏆

  • Launching a listing system that stays secure through Supabase authentication and RLS
  • Delivering a smooth real-time messaging experience
  • Making GPT work hand-in-hand with our database to recommend relevant parts
  • Designing an intuitive UI that feels natural for students to use
  • Shipping a fully functional AI-powered collaboration tool

What we learned 📚

  • Structuring databases and security rules with Supabase
  • Coordinating authentication across backend and frontend layers
  • Prompt-engineering GPT for reliable, structured outputs
  • Creating responsive UIs with React and Tailwind CSS
  • Troubleshooting the quirks of real-time systems like chat

Future Plans 🤖

  • A semantic search feature so that students can find relevant parts even if their wording doesn’t exactly match a listing
  • An integrated checklist for parts that the assistant suggests
  • Expanding to other college campuses across the United States

Built With 🛠️

Frontend Technologies

  • React – Component-based UI library
  • Vite – Fast development build tool
  • Tailwind CSS – Utility-first styling and responsive design
  • JavaScript – Core language for the frontend

Backend & Database

  • Supabase – Authentication, database, file storage, and real-time updates
  • PostgreSQL – Structured relational database under Supabase
  • RLS Policies – Secure access control for users and data

AI

  • OpenAI – For generating recommendations and formatted responses

Search

  • Simple Keyword Search – Fast lookup across stored items (non-semantic)

Deployment

  • Netlify – Hosting and continuous deployment for the frontend

Built With

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