Project Overview
SMILESBot is an open-source Discord bot designed for students and educators to visualize chemical structures. It renders SMILES (Simplified Molecular Input Line Entry System) strings into molecular images in real-time.
Demo
Inspiration
At the time, I was taking general chemistry and found it to be a pretty challenging course. I had a friend majoring in chemistry help me understand the material, and we heavily relied on Discord for communication. It was often difficult to explain chemical structures through text, so I thought it would be a good experience to learn about Discord frameworks and build something that actually helps people visualize what they're talking about. Currently, SMILESBot is serving over 60+ servers with over 30,000 users and is running on Google VM instances.