## Inspiration

**Michael has a problem**. When girls drop their apples, he has a tendency to dispose of them in wastebaskets. He always feels terrible afterward, and only handwritten letters of apology can truly convey how sorry he is. In order to save him time, we decided to automate the process.

## What it does

Dem Write Brothers is a **novel handwriting system** that takes just a few minutes to set up, but can save hours upon hours of time. Once you provide a brief sample of your handwriting, you can enter any message for our device to transcribe. The result will be indistinguishable from your own handwriting, and the device will add **perturbations** so no two letters are the same. Finally, for the ultimate personal feel, you can even write **batch letters** customized for each recipient.

## How we built it

For hardware, we started by cadding our device with Autodesk Inventor. We then laser cut and assembled the acrylic pieces for our device's framework. The wiring of our Dragonboard and Arduino devices rounded out this process.
Simultaneously, web app development started with user interface planning. The key components of the app, such as handwriting sampling, were then written using JavaScript. Finally, the web app was put together using many languages and services. Python and C were also used to program the Dragonboard and Arduino devices.

## Challenges we ran into

The moving parts of our device often caused us great headache. For instance, when some of the laser cut acrylic pieces experienced too much friction to slide past each other, we had to buy and apply WD-40. Some of the arduinos we used also died mid-testing.
On the software side, the usual missing end brackets were frustrating but easily solved. More nuanced, then, was the issue of UX. We wanted Dem Write Brothers to be simple and quickly learnable for all users, so our web app went through numerous redesigns.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite the electronic and mechanical difficulties of hardware assembly, our machine functions elegantly, according to design. After all, **it looks pretty dang slick**. In contrast to the complexities of the hardware and software, our user interface is minimalist and **retro**. It turns a computationally and physically complex device into something useable by anyone.

## What we learned

The importance of sleep cannot be overstressed. Unlike PennApps XVI, during which we slept about 4 hours each and rushed to complete our hack, we each slept a reasonably healthy amount and submitted our hack on DevPost early. We also worked together closely, so that each member of our team was involved throughout the whole process. These were valuable lessons that supplemented the many hardware and programming skills we honed throughout the hackathon.

## What's next for Dem Write Brothers

Though Dem Write Brothers was designed to help Michael with his apology letters, we're proud of its many potential applications. **Companies large and small** will be able to establish a more personal connection with their customers. **Politicians** will be able to reach out to their constituents; perhaps even political apathy and low voter turnout can be curbed. And for **everyday people**, writing heartfelt letters will no longer be a chore. We're looking forward to sharing our idea with the world, but in the meantime, Michael will be hogging Dem Write Brothers for a while.
## Inspiration

What if you could automate one of the most creative performances that combine music and spoken word? Everyone's watched those viral videos of insanely talented rappers online but what if you could get that level of skill? Enter **ghostwriter**, freestyling reimagined.

## What it does

**ghostwriter** allows you to skip through pre-selected beats where it will then listen to your bars, suggesting possible rhymes to help you freestyle. With the 'record' option, you can listen back to your freestyles and even upload them to share with your friends and listen to your friend's freestyles.

## How we built it

In order to build **ghostwriter** we used Google Cloud Services for speech-to-text transcription, the Cohere API for rhyming suggestions, Socket.io for reload time communication between frontend and backend, Express.js for backend, and the CockroachDB distributed SQL database to store transcription as well as the audio files. We used React for the fronted and styled with the Material UI library.

## Challenges we ran into

We had some challenges detecting when the end of a bar might be as different rhyming schemes and flows will have varying pauses. Instead, we decided to display rhyming suggestions for each word as the user then has the freedom to determine when they want to end their bar and start another. Another issue we had was figuring out the latency of the API calls to make sure the data was retrieved in time for the user to think of another bar. Finally, we also had some trouble using audio media players to record the user's freestyle along with the background music, however, we were able to find a solution in the end.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud to say that what we created during the past 36 hours is meeting its intended purpose. We were able to put all the components of this project in motion for the software to successfully hear our words and to generate rhyming suggestions in time for the user to think of another line and continue their freestyle. Additionally, using technologies that were new to us and coding away until it reached our goal expanded our technological expertise.

## What we learned

We learned how to use react and move the text around to match our desired styling. Next, we learned how to interact with numerous APIs (including Cohere's) in order to get the data we want to be organized in the way most efficient for us to display to the user. Finally, we learned how to freestyle better a bit ourselves.

## What's next for Ghostwriter

For **ghostwriter**, we aim to have a higher curation for freestyle beats and to build a social community to highlight the most fire freestyles. Our goal is to turn today's rappers into tomorrow's Hip-Hop legends!
## Inspiration

We always only have facebook events on our friends' timeline, so when you are boring, you may don't know what to do. So we wanna something to know if there are some guys party around you.

## What it does

Here is events map, we collect events information and show them on the map, you can get the details after you choose it.

## How I built it

With android studio, ask friends and search online info

## Challenges I ran into

hard to combine map with slide bar, database problem, Facebook login

## Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We made the DEMO!!!! Once you login, you directly have a map, and you can get the detail info of event which is nice and handy.nice UI

## What I learned

how to build api, how to write the android java

## What's next for Circle

we gonna find the way to collect information for Facebook instead of manually input, keep making ui looks better and easy to use.