Spiral Project

Main Dashboard
Animating the pattern
Full screen pattern

Inspiration

We had an idea for creating widgets for a dashboard, but we didn't have anything to display. After some back and forth, one of our members remembered an old project he had worked on that included some interesting patterns with colors. Combining these two ideas, we decided to create a dashboard that would allow for high customizability of the patterns.

What it does

Along with having a detailed widget system for the GUI, our project uses some interesting mathematical quirks and operations to create pleasing patterns.

How we built it

Other than the pygame library used for handling graphics, all other aspects of out project, from useful functions like a pythonic version of a switch statement, to the actual Widget class and sub-classes, to the formulas used to generate the patterns. All of them were coded by us, within the last 24 hours.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest two challenge we ran into were difficulty choosing a topic, and the time constraints of the hackathon. Although we decided on the dashboard widgets early on, it took a few hours for us to figure out what we were going to use them for. As for the timeframe, the whole project (like many others) would have been much easier with more time. However, the limitation pushed us to come up with unique solutions that we might have missed otherwise.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are quite proud of our entire project, though the backend for the widgets and related classes came together better than we had expected.

What we learned

We learned some neat tricks to use in programming, such as if a library has "turtle" in the name, it probably runs slowly. We ended up pushing the limits of our programming knowledge, in order to make a project we can be proud of.