CrackIt: Big Equations, Broken into Small Pieces (Built for My Brother)
💡 What I Built My younger brother is a diploma student in petrochemical engineering. Every evening, he sits with thick textbooks filled with dry, heavy equations like the Ergun Equation , Bernoulli's Principle , and Raoult's Law . Like many engineering students, he gets bored and overwhelmed by abstract derivations. When you're trying to understand how a packed catalyst bed in an oil…
I created a tool called CrackIt, which helps engineering students like my brother who struggle with complex formulas. The project was part of the Hacktoberfest Build for a Friend weekend challenge. CrackIt is an equation interpreter that breaks down heavy formulas into smaller, easier-to-understand pieces, using a friendly approach similar to a senior explaining things over chai.
CrackIt is designed for engineering students who work with equations such as the Ergun Equation, Bernoulli's Principle, and Raoult's Law. The tool provides a clear connection between the formula and real plant equipment, like distillation towers, hydrotreaters, and heat exchangers. It also explains each symbol in plain language along with its engineering units and offers an interactive focus picker.
The CrackIt interface is clean and visually appealing, with midnight navy and off-white color scheme and typography from Inter and STIX. Users can type in any equation name, such as the Ergun equation or Q = mCpΔT, and the tool will render the formula, showing its purpose with real plant examples.
One of the standout features of CrackIt is its ability to break down equations into 3-5 clear steps with round numbers. Users can also try the calculations live through an interactive calculator where they can tweak parameters like flow rates, particle size, and void fraction, and see the outputs recalculate in real time.
CrackIt also includes a "What If..." section that provides intuitive insights about real plant operations, like how smaller catalyst particles create a substantially higher pressure drop due to the d p 2 term in the denominator.
Finally, the tool offers a practice challenge with an answer checker powered by Google's open-weight Gemma 3 4B AI model. The live demo and code for CrackIt are available on Render, and the repository can be found on GitHub.
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