CampusSwap

Inspiration

Students are always moving in and out of dorms and have stuff that they want or need to get rid of. Moving is stressful and often things get left behind or thrown out when they are still in good enough condition to be used by others. We wanted to reduce that waste and connect students together in a convenient way!

What it does

Creates posts with as little as a single photo, using an AI agent to generate details for you to edit and approve.
Maps directly to UBC buildings so you can see exactly where things are available.
Restricts posting and seller contact details to UBC email accounts.
Lets users filter by category and by free / for sale / trade, or describe what they need and let AI search recommend nearby items.

How we built it

We started with long domain analysis to identify all of our differentiating features and then moved on to finding out what we needed to use to build this. We used Python (FastAPI) for our backend and TypeScript (Next.js) for our frontend, with Supabase for the database and sign-in, and used a Cloudflare Tunnel to expose the locally hosted app so we can access it via HTTPS over the internet.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled to find a way to differentiate out project from other general e-commerce platforms. We also had some issues with UI elements acting in ways we didn't want. On both issues, it took a lot of extra iterations before we were able to get them in a form we were happy with. Map clutter was the final challenge we encountered, and were able to group items to a moderate degree in the end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We believe the project looks great and includes a lot of extra functionality compared to our original (smaller) scope. We are also happy we were able to implement locally-run, open-source model to assist with post creation, which is free for us and users. It works on mobile too!

What we learned

Projects like this have a lot more moving parts than we originally thought. There was a large amount of hidden work that we found we needed to do after getting started.