bitesy

snap, share, and see with bitesy.

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What it does

snap, share, and see with bitesy. bitsey is a digital product that was created with the idea of boosting awareness around eating habits, educating the youth, and becoming an industry leader. bitsey combines a fun, and spontaneous photo-sharing with reliable calorie tracking, offered through a simplistic user-friendly interface and a supportive community to make eating fun and engaging.

  • Track your food: Simply snap a picture of your meal, and bitesy uses smart image recognition to estimate calorie intake.
  • Join the community: Share your meals and connect with friends to see what yummy foods they are eating.
  • Level up your knowledge: Bitesy provides educational insight and gamified features to keep you engaged and constantly aware of your eating habits.

How we built it

Bitesy is built with the latest technologies to ensure a smooth and secure experience.

  • React Native + Expo(Javascript & Tailwind): We used these robust frameworks to create a user-friendly and visually appealing mobile app. (Front-end)
  • Django (Python): This powerful backend framework manages data and interactions within the app. (Backend)
  • VertexAI: To process images, and feed the output to Gemini to identify the number of calories.
  • Google Gemini
  • Google Cloud: We leverage Google Cloud's services for secure image storage (buckets), database management (Postgres with Docker), and app deployment.

Challenges we ran into

For GDSC Hacks, we decided to ditch our comfort zone and dive headfirst into uncharted technological territory. Every technology (except for languages, of course) we used for this project was brand new to us. We learned on the fly!

Now, some of our chosen technologies, like React Native and Django, are known to be a bit buggier and less beginner-friendly than their counterparts, Swift and Flask. This meant a lot of careful document reading and deciphering cryptic error messages. "Network error," anyone? Let's just say those logs weren't exactly clear.

To make things even more interesting, we discovered (fairly deep into the Hackathon, no less) that API calls made to localhost on React Native actually point to the device's localhost, not our computers. This revelation forced us to pivot and deploy our Django backend to Google Cloud. As a result, most of our debugging happened in a TMUX session, with code written directly in the console using vim (we totally forgot about VS Code's SSH extensions!). Without the helpful guidance of IntelliSense or Copilot, meticulous coding became paramount.

Finally, getting the camera and image functionality working on both the phone and backend proved to be a real head-scratcher. Documentation was scarce, things were fragile, and debugging was a nightmare. Each bug demanded a mountain of logs to pinpoint the culprit, and tight collaboration between front-end and back-end devs was absolutely essential. But through constant communication between our team, we conquered these challenges and are excited to introduce you all to bitesy.

What's next for bitesy

  1. More Nutritional Information - Add more information outside of calorie count, and diving into the macronutrients
  2. bitesy Step counter - Provide users a steps counter and the calories burnt through exercise
  3. Continued AI Improvement - Actively improve bitesy's AI accuracy through regular updates and refinements aimed at maximizing convenience and user experience.

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