Fractals.tech

User friendly website that allows you to create several different types of fractals and change how it looks in your browser before saving it to your computer.

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Inspiration

We are all a part of an online community for computer science students at Clemson and we have semi-regular discussions about fractals and the pictures and art you can create from them. And since we have two graduate students, including a math major, we thought we would build a website that allows anyone to make several different types of fractals from their browser.

What it does

It allows the user to specify different parameters for the fractal algorithms that can change how they look and the patterns they show, as well as change the color gradient if wanted. The hosting server then computes the fractal image and returns it for the user to see, with the option to download it. The user can make changes the parameters and see it change at the same time.

How we built it

We bought a domain from domain.com (www.fractals.tech) that uses CloudFlare to serve HTTPS and point to a Google Compute Engine instance running our website, written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. When the user changes parameters, it use a FastAPI to send requests to our python scripts that create the specified fractal type and passes in the specified parameters. Then will return the link to the location of the created image.

Challenges we ran into

The math for fractals is very complex and took a long time to fully figure out how, especially for numerous types of fractals. Designing the website to work with the API to request a fractal render also took some time to figure out how to do correctly, but is very good experience. Getting values from sliders and color pickers on request and packaging it as a JSON request was troublesome, but we eventually figured it out. We also had a bunch of issues uninstalling and disabling apache on our Compute instance for some reason.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our team members for figuring out the math behind fractals, setting up an API and compute instance very quickly, and the website we built with all the features under the hood in a short time. We also balanced our time so that we got sleep, got a lot of work done, and had some fun with different activities.

What we learned

We all learned about stuff we had not really been exposed too much. Whether its the math behind fractals, building a website, working with an API, or doing cloud development, it was great experience all around for all of us.

What's next for Fractals.tech

We hope to be able to keep it going without burning a hole in our wallets, but we may would like to add some more features to it overtime!

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