At home without any idea of what to eat or do you have some ingredients but not sure of what recipes you could prepare? TastyDinner has it all for you. Check out our webpage for inspiration and love!
Winner of Hack The 6ix 2021's main sponsor, Bank of Montreal, challenge
Devpost: https://devpost.com/software/tastyfood Demo Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd11Y4tCjiY
Our team is full of food lovers and what’s a better way to show this passion than to design and develop a website related to it! We were inspired by the Hack The 6ix sponsor BMO, who proposed the challenge of answering “What to eat for dinner?”. We realized that this is probably the most asked question during the pandemic, since we can’t go out normally, and search our fridges every 15 minutes at home for something to eat. Hence, we wondered how people could prepare themselves a meal with just 5 ingredients found in the fridge? Don’t worry, TastyDinner is here for you!
TastyDinner is here to answer the question: “What to eat for dinner?” by:
- Giving inspiration with a gallery of delicious food items to look at!
- Outputting recipes you can make with the ingredients you already have!
- Using Vision AI from Google Cloud’s Vision API for a cool experience!
The gallery presented allows you to scroll and gather inspiration, which can help you find the answer to what you want to eat! It’s done by using the Flickr API, where the application dynamically gets many photos related to delicious food items to display for your eyes! As for the output of recipes, users are able to input ingredients they already have and our application will handle the rest! Our team implemented two ways for a user to input their ingredients. The first way is sending a photo of their ingredients list or receipt, and from there, it would be passed through the Google Cloud Vision API for processing of text! The second way is a simpler approach, where users could just type in ingredients themselves. After we efficiently process the received ingredients, we then use the Spoonacular API to receive a list of recipes one could make that best fits the ingredients given! With this web app, you can enter your list of ingredients available or take a picture of a written note and then we’ll recommend the ideal meal for you!
The project was built in Visual Studio Code with MongoDB, Express, React.js, Node.js, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We also built an android version using Android Studio and Java that integrates with the same Node.js server being used on the web app.
Our team is composed of beginner hackers, and we struggled with some of the most basic things. From trouble with github, and learning what a “pull request” was to being unable to connect our React frontend with our Node.js backend, somehow we were able to push through. After staying up till 3AM on the first day, and then pulling an all nighter on the last day of the hackathon, we worked really hard to get our current results! In the end, we had a huge blast laughing about the dumbest things past midnight, and we loved the process of fixing 3 hour long bugs. We learned in this hackathon that anything is possible, and that we were able to build a full stack app in just 36 hours!
We are proud of developing a website/android app that looks aesthetically pleasing, and with a fully functioning, modularized backend given our skillset. Our team worked really hard together to develop all aspects of our product.
We learned an incredible amount about web development and integrating the frontend and backend. Many of us came into the project with very diverse skills, so we were able to learn a lot from each other.
Stay tuned, stay hungry, cause you are going to get a #TastyDinner. TastyLunch coming soon!