Picanote

A software revolutionizing online learning and note-taking by allowing students to take notes at lightening speed with image recognition and optimized search functions, with versatile access to notes.

Comment 2

Inspiration

Online learning is very hard. It's hard to focus, hard to take notes and hard to listen, and hard to share notes. So we created Picanote.

What it does

It's a desktop and mobile app that allows you to screenshot images, use AI to extract text from the image and save it to a database. So you can search your screenshots and find the notes that matter to you in seconds!

How we built it

There are two mobile apps, one for android and one for ios with different UI/UX!

The desktop portion was made using python.

The backend was written in NodeJS, GCP functions, Firebase Auth, and cockroachDB. Cockroach DB makes sure our data won't disappear. GCP Functions lets us leave the app up at a very low cost and Firebase Auth lets us focus on the more functional par t of our app.

Challenges we ran into

The backend had some weird errors on account of javascript that were very difficult to debug.

Clean image recognition on the desktop app was also a challenge.

Blue screen of death in 2021. (Unix > windows).

google cloud not making it clear how to export functions (more from a lack of us reading the docs).

It was also tricky getting google auth to work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our project is functional. For some of us (Jack) this is the first time creating a project that actually works at the end.

What we learned

To setup google cloud functions, to setup cockroachDB, to get data from an api and write better error messages. To use firebase to setup our mobile apps.
javascript bad, strong typing good. Flutter good, react bad. CockroachDB easy pgsql setup good, CockroachDB free trial fake. Json bad, Jason good

What's next for Picanote

We are going public and starting investements at 10$ per share with a float of 20 shares

+ 1 more
Share this project:

Updates