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Library

Aion

Calgary Hacks 2026
Topic 2: Preserve Today for Tomorrow: Why Archives Matter

Getting Started

Setup

Create and activate a virtual environment
Install dependencies: bash pip install -r requirements.txt

Run

python app.py

Open http://127.0.0.1:5000/ in your browser.

Inspiration

Our inspiration comes from when documents are being digitalized they're oftentime not accessible by prioritizing a people first design, screen readers can't read image only PDFs, search doesn't work, and sharing is really messy. We wanted an archive tool that treats accessibility as the default—OCR for readability, text-to-speech, translation, and export formats so more people can actually use preserved information.

What does Aion do?

Aion turns documents (photos/scans/PDFs) into a searchable, shareable archive with accessibility in mind.

Core Features

Upload/capture documents and run OCR to extract text
Store metadata (title, tags, date, source) for organization
Reader experience with tools like text-to-speech and export options (where supported)
Generate share access (links/codes) for easy viewing
Version history so updates don't overwrite the past

How Aion was built

We built Aion as a simple pipeline:

Capture/Upload a file (image/PDF/text)
Preprocess (clean up scans, handle PDFs)
Extract text using OCR / PDF text extraction
Store the file + extracted text + metadata in a database
Index/Search so users can find documents by content + tags
Serve a UI to browse libraries, view records, and share them

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was scoping and differentiation. We initially committed to Topic 3, developing a game around the prompt “Impermanence.” During early prototyping, we realized our concept wasn’t distinct enough and risked being too surface-level.

We made the decision to pivot to Topic 2, where the challenge of preserving and accessing archives offered deeper technical and design problems. The pivot forced rapid re-planning under time pressure, but it ultimately improved the clarity, usefulness, and impact of our final build.

We also ran into a number of issues while integrating the Raspberry Pi into our project. Hardware introduced a lot of uncertainty—device setup, connectivity, and reliably triggering our capture/scan flow—so we spent time debugging ports, dependencies, and inconsistent behavior across machines. Getting the Pi to work smoothly with the rest of our pipeline was a challenge, especially under hackathon time constraints.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Shipped a full pipeline from scanning to search in a hackathon timeframe
Made documents searchable through OCR + metadata
Built sharing + version history to keep archives useful and trustworthy
Prioritized accessibility features instead of treating them as an afterthought
Successfully integrated Raspberry Pi scanning into the workflow (despite hardware pain)

What we learned

Scoping matters as much as coding: choosing the right problem early (and pivoting when needed) made the project stronger
OCR is only as good as the input: scan quality, lighting, and preprocessing heavily affect accuracy
Data + metadata design is everything: storing files is easy—making them searchable and organized requires a clean model
Hardware adds uncertainty: integrating the Raspberry Pi introduced debugging time we didn't fully anticipate (connectivity, ports, reliability)
Accessibility can't be an afterthought: building for real users means designing for readability and multiple ways to consume information