Grocery Selection GUI
Scraping Multi-Thread (with visual enabled)
Optimized Path Traversal Animation
Optimized Path Traversal Image

Wegmans Grocery Path Finder

(Best Overall and Civic Service Category Winners!)

By: Kevin Leger, Ryan Brennan, Nathan Czarnecki, Gabriel Fatade, Zimuzo Udedibia

Inspiration

We often find ourselves getting lost and wasting time in grocery stores. It's annoying enough for us, and we imagine that those who suffer from movement-based disabilities have an even worse time trying to find the items they need, especially for non-numbered aisle locations

What it does

Helps people find the optimum shopping route via a graphical trace representation. Supports manual item entry and checkbox format.

How we built it

Python, Selenium webscraping due to lack of public Wegmans API, and A* search algorithm

Challenges we ran into

We had to learn how to web scrape for the first time, our team was fairly unexperienced with graphical applications beforehand, and we had never assembled a project with so many independent stages, much less with stages being developed simultaneously, and even MUCH less did we have experience with doing so in a 24-hour time window. There were too many challenges to individually name here, but they all centered around those 3 categories and our team members trailblazing into new territories.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It was amazing to see everything come together in the end as a single operating unit. None of us truly understood how the whole program worked, but we trusted each other to deliver what was requested to the next stage of the pipeline, and it all worked out. The program had never been fully assembled with an hour to submission, but it all just fell right into place.

What's next for Wegmans Grocery Path Finder

Due to the web-scraping nature of how we catalogue information, we would feel uncomfortable with a public release in its current state, as this might put undue strain on Wegman servers. However, should Wegmans ever choose to release a public API, which seems to currently be reserved for internal employees only, we would like to improve the usability of the software with real maps of the local store and provide more information about the items being purchased.