Farmer's Market

Welcome
Search Results
Food Detail

Inspiration

I wanted to upgrade a previous app for the new display devices

What it does

Allows the user to search for what foods are in season. Requests can be made for specific food types (fruits or vegetables) and a specific state or time of year.

Relative dates are supported (e.g. "next month", "this summer")

How I built it

I used the Java-based Alexa skills kit API. The actual code runs in an AWS Lambda instance.

Searches are performed against an embedded SQLite DB. Images and descriptive text are stored in an S3 folder.

Challenges I ran into

Learning the latest API, especially the display capabilities and API. It's not terribly well documented so I had to do a fair amount of API analysis.

Also the voice responses had to be tailored to account for whether a user is accessing a display-based device or an audio-only device.

Creating the photo and text assets was time consuming. For part of it I wrote an app the rip relevant content from Wikipedia.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Implementing an API layer above the display calls that manages the screen stack allowing for easy "back a screen" functionality and screen re-rendering.