Syllabus2Cal

Drop in your syllabi and get every class, exam and deadline on your phone calendar. It stays in sync when plans change, and shows your busiest weeks before they hit.

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Inspiration

Every semester I get five syllabi, and each one hides 30+ dates inside a PDF: lectures, quizzes, midterms, homework, holidays. Copying them into my calendar takes an hour, and I still missed a quiz. Then a professor moves an exam and the whole thing is out of date again. I wanted a tool where the syllabus goes in once and my phone just knows.

What it does

Syllabus2Cal turns syllabi into a live calendar on your phone.

  • Upload anything: PDF, Word, screenshots or pasted text. Drop several courses at once.
  • AI extraction: finds weekly class times, exams, quizzes, deadlines and no-class days, and flags anything it's unsure about.
  • Review & edit: a month calendar and a course editor. Click to edit an exam, add an event, or cancel a single class.
  • Workload heatmap: combines all your courses week by week, so you can spot "hell weeks" before they arrive.
  • Live phone sync: scan a QR code once to subscribe. Every edit on the site shows up on your phone, with reminders before classes and exams.
  • Smart re-upload: if a professor sends an updated syllabus, re-upload it and only what changed is updated (e.g. "Midterm 1: Oct 7 → Oct 9").
  • No sign-up, free, works on any network.

How I built it

  • Backend: Python + FastAPI
  • AI: Google Gemini API reads PDFs and images natively and returns structured JSON. Text-based PDFs and Word files are pre-extracted with pdfplumber / python-docx.
  • Calendar: standards-compliant iCalendar feeds built with icalendar. Weekly classes are recurrence rules with holiday exceptions, and time zones and daylight saving time are handled correctly.
  • Storage: Firebase Firestore
  • Frontend: a single-page vanilla JS app (calendar view, heatmap, editor)
  • Deployment: Render, with the calendar feed regenerated on every request so subscribed phones always get the latest version
  • Domain: live at syllab.club (registered with GoDaddy Registry)

Challenges I ran into

  • AI output isn't deterministic. Re-uploading a syllabus sometimes produced "MATH 2101" instead of "Mathematics 2101.001", creating duplicate courses. I fixed it by sending existing courses to the model as context, plus fuzzy matching of courses and event titles (while making sure "Midterm 1" never matches "Midterm 2").
  • Unreliable free AI tier. Models were retired or overloaded mid-hackathon, so I added automatic retries and fallback to other available models.
  • Campus Wi-Fi blocks device-to-device traffic, so my phone couldn't reach my laptop server. I deployed to the cloud and moved storage to Firestore so data survives restarts.
  • Calendar edge cases: recurring classes, holiday exceptions, time zones and deadlines that end at 11:59 PM.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • Built and deployed solo in 24 hours, and it's live and usable right now.
  • Tested on real Temple University syllabi: every exam was extracted correctly.
  • Edits made on the website sync to a real iPhone calendar.

What I learned

AI extraction is powerful but never 100% reliable, so good design keeps the human in the loop: review before saving, clear warnings, and easy editing. I also learned a lot about calendar standards, cloud deployment, and handling flaky external APIs.

What's next

  • Google sign-in, so your calendars follow you across devices
  • One-click Google Calendar integration for Android users
  • Canvas / Blackboard import
  • Smart study-time suggestions before heavy weeks

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