Spot | Devpost

Inspiration

It was 11:39 PM on a Wednesday morning when I woke up to some unfortunate news. My favorite bike was missing, nowhere to be found. In a surge of desperation, I instantly surfed the web for any possible listings of my bike to no avail. If only there was a website dedicated to posting such listings that were inclusive to UC Davis students to create an efficient search for lost items. And that's when the idea struck me...an app for missing items.

What it does

The app allows UC Davis students to create posts for their missing valuables and provide an incentive for other students to find them. This incentive can range from money to any other form of compensation. Alternatively, students who find lost items can post them on our app for others to see. Each post requires an image, title, location, date, and incentive.

How we built it + Challenges we ran into

For this project, we initially started with Firebase, an unfamiliar technology for all of us. When we weren't successful, we transitioned over to MySQL. However, we still had issues in building our web app so we finally transitioned to SQLite in combination with Flask, Python, HTML, and CSS. We were trying to utilize feature detection for the user to hold their item in front of the camera for the app to automatically detect the item. However, the class sizes we used in Pytorch didn't simply limit to a single-digit number of items but realized that there are hundreds of different categories/items that can be posted on the Spot app. Additionally, creating a dataset that matches a picture with a label was difficult to do apart from the preset Pytorch datasets.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We had struggles with the databases but we overcame it by focusing on the customer needs and narrowing down the best options.

What we learned

Working in a team is a high-stakes, high-pressure situation where people of different cultures and different backgrounds come together to participate in Hack Davis. It's always important to have an open mind.