DSS: Smart Shelf

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  Sensors

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  Füd

Inspiration

_ “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” _ - Bill Gates Let's be honest, a lot of us are lazy. And forgetful. We wanted to automate one of the most common interactions of our lifetimes; dealing with the stock in our kitchen pantry and shelves. The main idea behind this Smart Shelf is that when you run low on a product, your grocery list will be automatically updated so that you can pick it up on your next outing. Another feature is the ability to view the current stock of your shelf (currently at MVP stage).

What it does

It uses sensors in order to alert you when your inventory is low and also allows you to view the status of your shelf.

How we built it

We hooked up load cells and an ultrasonic sensor to an Arduino that sends data through a serial port to the Pi. The Pi in turn takes that and filters the data and pushes the data to a Firestore database. A react application then updates the information on the screen in real time and displays the percentage of items on the shelf.

Challenges we ran into

Various hardware bugs and issues that poped up unexpectedly. Needed to filter out extraneous values from the hardware sensors through software.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

React app! Hardware software communication skills!

What we learned

We learned a ton about working with hardware and React applications. We also learned how to push data to Firestore using Python and get that data and display it in realtime on a React website.

What's next for DSS: Smart Shelf

A whole lot more! We plan to integrate this into our existing (also MVP) Roommate app!