Urgent.News

What's breaking now, across thousands of outlets.

Tech

CheckMate: A 3D spatial twin of my best friend's hostel room so he stops leaving his charger behind

This is my submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend . What I Built My best friend Kanwal has a habit of leaving things behind. Not small, insignificant things. Important things. Things he will desperately need approximately 45 minutes after leaving the hostel. Like his charger. Picture this: you're preparing for a college presentation. Your laptop is charged, your…

This submission, for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge, aims to build a solution for a friend's recurring problem. The friend, Kanwal, has a habit of leaving behind essential items, like his charger, which he desperately needs only minutes after departing from their hostel. The challenge with traditional reminders is that they are purely digital and don't connect to the physical items, making it hard to remind Kanwal of what he's left behind.

To address this, CheckMate was created. It's a trip-aware packing assistant based on a 3D representation of Kanwal's actual hostel room. This 3D room, built using Three.js, includes furniture, items, and even a wall switchboard that closely resembles the real-life reference photograph. The 3D representation helps the user relate the interface to their real surroundings and makes it easier to understand what should be packed.

The app includes interactive belongings that can be selected within the scene. These interactive objects have visual indicators and status badges to help distinguish what has been packed. The app also uses AI and voice capabilities through Google Gemma to generate packing recommendations based on the trip context, the items in the room, and the user's past packing mistakes.

So, CheckMate is not just a simple checklist app. It's a more sophisticated system that uses spatial interfaces, AI, and a 3D room model to help users remember what they've left behind. This project shows how technology can be creatively used to solve everyday problems, making our lives a little easier.

Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.

Read the original at dev.to →

More in Tech

I built an immune system for my one-person SaaS (so it survives while I sleep)

I run two production sites as a one-person operation. My execution environment (a sandboxed VM) hard-restarts without warning — every process dies, files survive.

  • Author creates multi-layered immune system for SaaS platforms
  • Layer 1 ensures proper organization and persistent state
  • Layer 2 uses watchdog daemon to monitor and relaunch daemons

Study Helper

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend ⚡ Study Helper: The Distraction-Free Focus & Active Recall Companion What I Built I built Study Helper —an aesthetic…

  • Study Helper consolidates study tools into a single distraction-free web app
  • Features include customizable Pomodoro clock, 3D flashcards, quiz arena
  • Built-in ambient sounds and supportive "Study Buddy" companion

Playwright Retry Budgets Need a Failure Receipt

Retries are useful when a browser test meets a temporary network problem. They become harmful when every failure gets three more attempts with no record of what happened.

  • Implement a small retry budget for Playwright suites
  • Create a failure receipt with test, attempt, and relevant artifacts
  • Classify assertion failures separately from dependency timeouts

Health Diary

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend What I Built I built Health Diary — an effortless, privacy-first nutrition and calorie tracking web app designed for my…

  • Health Diary simplifies nutrition tracking with voice/text input
  • Automatic parsing extracts food items, calculates portions
  • Open-source app stores data locally for privacy

More from Sunday 4 October →