Terava | Devpost

Inspiration

When we first thought about an idea for this hackathon, we realized how much food is wasted globally every day, often simply because people forget what they have or when it's going to expire. We wanted to build a simple, effective tool to combat this waste, starting right in our own pantries and refrigerators.

What it does

Terava is a smart inventory system that keeps your whole fridge inside of your pocket. It keeps a comprehensive, real-time log of the food items in your house. The core feature is its ability to provide timely shelf life updates, allowing you to use items before they spoil. By providing this visibility, Terava helps you reduce food waste and save money.

How we built it

We structured the project around a mobile-first application with a robust backend. We started by drafting out all necessary API endpoints and designing the user interface (UI) flow. The application then uses these endpoints to interact with Supabase, our chosen database, for storage and real-time updates. We used JavaScript and Expo for the front-end mobile application, Python for our custom backend logic (to handle things like data processing), and integrated the Gemini API for advanced features.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest hurdle was that this was our first time using Supabase. We went into it with minimal prior knowledge, and this created a steep learning curve. We spent a significant amount of time troubleshooting and debugging, particularly in getting our API calls and database interactions to work properly, a crucial component for fetching and updating item data reliably. It was a tough but rewarding technical challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite the challenges, we're really proud of the final product, especially considering the 24-hour time limit! We successfully implemented a smooth, functional, and aesthetically pleasing scrolling UI on the mobile application. We're also immensely proud of completing some of our first hackathons together as a team. It's a huge win to bring an idea to a deployable state in such a short window.

What we learned

We gained a huge amount of technical knowledge under pressure, especially around working with new technologies like Supabase and integrating various services. Just as valuable were the soft skills we learned: working effectively with new team members (some of us met for the first time just yesterday!) and experiencing the entire product lifecycle- from generating an idea, drafting it out, coding, and achieving a deployment within a tight 24-hour constraint. We also learned valuable lessons in scoping, realizing we had great ideas for features we had to cut, but now we have a clear direction for the future.

What's next for Terava

We've only scratched the surface. We have so many ideas and a clear, exciting path forward for developing Terava into a fully-featured application. Next steps include adding shared household lists, optimizing the backend/API calls to reduce application wait-time, and building out a dedicated recipe suggestion engine based on items that are nearing expiration. We're committed to continuing to build and refine this application.