Cal Scanner | Devpost

Inspiration~💡

After a year of sitting around the house, the last thing we needed in our lives is a sedentary diet. With the help of Cal Scanner, users can see just how much calorie intake their plate of food it without the tediousness of googling recipes and manually counting calories.

What it does ⚙️

Users can take pictures of their food and drinks and Cal Scanner will detect the amount of calories in each part of your meal (e.g. side of fries, noodles, bowl soup, shot of vodka).

After your big meal, Cal Scanner can also recommend workout activities to do to burn off your target calorie count for the day. Workouts can vary from requiring gym equipment to only needing your body and motivation!

How we built it 🤩

For the front-end side, we used Expo and utilized several API's including--but not limited to--Google, Facebook and Twitter. We also used MongoDB to manage user accounts and photo memory and TensorFlow to recognize food products and associate them with calorie amounts.

Challenges we ran into 💥

In the beginning, we ran into a loooot of troubles (but thank god for Mentors am I right?). Although there are still much more challenges ahead in Cal Scanner's path, setting up Expo and Xcode were two of our biggest ones because they took a HOT MINUTE (4-ish hours to be exact) ⚛️

Making Cal Scanner was our first time using Expo and React Native to create a mobile app and installing Expo was one of the most time-consuming tasks we have to face. A few of our flails included npm installations not working or being no where to be found, Xcode taking FOREVER to download and having to read vague documentation when using a new framework the first time.

Also, since backend and frontend processes are very interdependent, we had to delay our processes by a lot just because of how long it took to install everything.

Accomplishments that we're proud of ✔️

We learned a lot about iOS and Android development in a really reaaaaally compressed amount of time, which is something to be proud of considering learning how to create a mobile app takes longer than 12 hours.

What we learned 🎯

When in doubt, mentors are your best friends. Since a lot of them work as professional software developers (or at the very least have attended hackathons before), you can be sure that they have a vast array of knowledge they can share with you -- which includes technical knowledge and industry knowledge.

Also, install things you think you may need before hacking begins it'll save you loads of time