Upcycle Wizard

Upcycle Wizard is an AI-powered app that helps you transform anything—furniture, clothes, gadgets—into something new. Take a quiz, get a AI-generated guide, and build it with a voice-guided assistant.

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Inspiration

The idea for Upcycle Wizard came from a mix of frustration and hope. I was staring at a pile of "junk" - an old lamp, a scratched-up side table, and some clothes I hadn’t worn in years. I knew there had to be a better way than just tossing them. I started looking up upcycling tutorials and realized two things:

  1. Most of them weren’t beginner-friendly
  2. None of them were personalised for my needs and expertise.

That’s when the idea hit: what if AI could turn waste into creativity? And hence Upcycle Wizard was born. Think of Upcycle Wizard as Bolt.new but for Upcycling projects.

What it does

Upcycle Wizard is an app that helps anyone turn old or unused items like furniture, clothing, tech, you name it, into something new and useful. Users take a quick quiz about the item, tools they have, and their skill level. The app then generates a custom upcycling plan, complete with step-by-step instructions and AI-generated visuals. It even has a voice assistant for hands-free help while you're building.

For judges: Either create a new account on Upcycle Wizard or use the following credentials

How we built it

The whole project was coded using Bolt.new. The frontend is built with React and styled using Tailwind. We used Supabase for the backend—Auth for user accounts, Storage for uploading content, and Edge Functions to handle the AI workflows. Bolt.new's integration with Supabase made life so much easier.

Google Gemini powers the plan generation, both text and image-based. For the build mode, I integrated ElevenLabs to offer a voice assistant that walks users through each step. There’s also a community explore feed where users can share their creations, and a sustainability scoring system that evaluates each project’s impact. Again, bolt.new was able to come up with end-to-end implementation for both the Supabase edge functions handling voice mode and guide generation using Gemini.

One thing to note, I used ChatGPT to initially scope out the project and write a mega prompt to feed to bolt.new. I also used some initial UI drafts from v0.dev which helped give a better structure and UI to the project from get go.

Challenges we ran into

One shot prompt was a challenge I initially wanted to tackle which was tough to do for such a complex project.

Getting the quiz-to-plan logic right was trickier than expected. Too general and the output feels bland; too specific and it breaks for edge cases. Prompt engineering for Gemini was a learning curve; it took a lot of trial and error to get outputs that were actually useful and not overly generic.

Supabase RLS policies did make me falter once in a while, but I got a hang of it, and well Bolt.new's discuss mode came to the rescue.

One small hiccup, I wanted to build using Next.js but it seems Next.js, Bolt.new and Supabase don't work super seamlessly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Seeing the first complete upcycling plan come together from quiz to visuals to voice guidance was honestly surreal. I also feel good about how intuitive the app feels, especially for people who don’t identify as “DIY types.”

What we learned

Bolt.new taught me a lot of best practices to approach and build such complex projects and integrate with DB, Auth and Edge functions with ease. I also learned a ton about sustainability, not just from a coding perspective, but from researching how people think about waste and reuse.

On the technical side, Supabase Edge Functions and voice integration were both new to me, and they pushed me to level up fast.

What's next for Upcycle Wizard

Next steps for this project are:

  1. Expanding the quiz to cover more categories like electronics and kids' items
  2. Adding an AI agent which explores the internet and finds inspiration to further enhance the upcycling guide quality
  3. Adding another AI agent which finds the extra materials needed to upcycle according to our generated guide on platforms like Amazon, eBay etc. and provides links to the user to buy as well

Built With

  • anthropic
  • bolt
  • elevenlabs
  • gemini
  • netlify
  • react
  • supabase
  • tailwindcss
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