Alright, let’s dive into this whole “receipts vs recipes” thing. It started with me staring at a pile of receipts and thinking, “Man, there’s gotta be a better way to track this stuff.” So, I decided to build something myself. Here’s how it went down.
First things first, I needed a plan. I grabbed a notebook – the old-school kind – and started sketching out what I wanted. Basically, I envisioned a simple app where I could snap a photo of a receipt, and it would automatically pull out the important info like the date, amount, and vendor. Then, I wanted to categorize it for easier tracking. Recipes came into play because I also wanted to be able to save my favorite food recipes in the same place, that thought come to my mind suddenly. One stone, two birds, right?
Next up was choosing the tools. I’m a fan of Python, so that was a no-brainer for the backend. For the frontend, I went with React because I’m somewhat familiar with it and it’s pretty quick to get something up and running. And for the database, I decided on PostgreSQL. I’ve used it before, and it’s reliable. I fired up my trusty VS Code and started setting up the basic project structure.
Okay, time to get my hands dirty. The first thing I tackled was the receipt scanning. I looked into a few OCR (Optical Character Recognition) libraries, and ended up going with Tesseract OCR. It’s open-source and has decent accuracy. I wrote a Python script that takes an image as input, runs it through Tesseract, and spits out the text. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a start.
Parsing the OCR output was a real pain. Receipts are all formatted differently! I tried using some regex (regular expressions) to extract the date, amount, and vendor, but it was a mess. I spent a good chunk of time tweaking the regex patterns, and eventually got something that worked reasonably well for most of my receipts. It’s definitely an area that could use some improvement, maybe using some ML model in the future.
Then, it was time to build the React frontend. I created a simple form where the user can upload a receipt image. The image gets sent to the Python backend, which runs the OCR and parsing. The parsed data is then sent back to the frontend, where it’s displayed in the form. The user can then review the data, make any necessary corrections, and save the receipt to the database.
For the recipes part, I decided to keep it simple. I created a basic form where the user can enter the recipe name, ingredients, and instructions. The data gets saved to the database, and the recipes are displayed in a list. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done.
I added some basic styling to make the app look somewhat presentable. I’m no designer, but I managed to make it functional and not too ugly. I also added some search functionality so I could easily find specific receipts or recipes.
After a few weeks of tinkering, I had a working app. It’s not perfect, but it does what I need it to do. I can now easily track my receipts and save my favorite recipes in one place. Plus, I learned a ton about OCR, regex, and web development along the way.
Here’s the rough outline of the project:
- Backend: Python with Flask
- Frontend: React
- Database: PostgreSQL
- OCR: Tesseract OCR
Key learnings:
- OCR is harder than it looks.
- Regex can be a powerful tool, but it can also be a nightmare.
- Building your own tools can be a great way to learn.
Next steps:
- Improve the accuracy of the receipt parsing.
- Add more features to the recipe section, like the ability to import recipes from websites.
- Deploy the app to a cloud platform so I can access it from anywhere.
So yeah, that’s the story of my “receipts vs recipes” project. It was a fun and challenging experience, and I’m happy with the result. Hopefully, this little write-up inspires you to build something cool yourself!
