KuriusHacks: Christmas Edition F2020 : : [ Food@Home ]

What's in your fridge? Let's find out!

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Event

KuriusHacks: Christmas Edition, Fall 2020

Inspiration

The team was inspired to create a mobile waste management (pantry) application to help children in regards to nutrition and education of food security. To that end, we built this app to keep track of perishables and non-perishables in the fridge, and to urge parents to build healthy meals with the items they have on hand, before they expire, via a recipe catalogue. We are aiming for Challenge Track #2 and Challenge Track #3.

What It Does

Food@Home is a virtual food pantry application that tracks all items in your fridge or pantry, and organizes it from most to least perishable. Afterwards, it allows the user to check what's in stock at any given time, and even helps the user find recipes associated with the ingredients they already have!

How We Built It

We built this application using the Thunkable block-coding platform for both Android and iOS. Some time was spent on researching recipes and setting up an item-tracker, while the rest was spent creating graphics and streamlining the user interface for easy use. Due to the nature of Thunkable, a few hours were spent simply compiling the code into a ready-to-use package!

Challenges We Ran Into

Some challenges we ran into involved integrating the list-viewer on a single screen to accept new inputs and organize them by date. Other problems involved working on the Thunkable platform collaboratively in real-time, which was difficult to accomplish because of Thunkable's own singular workflow. However, we did manage to accomplish a variety of prototypes through these roadblocks, and select the one that best worked for us to add any remaining functionality to.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

The team is proud to have a functional pantry application, as well as an easy-to-use recipe catalogue in the web-viewer of the hack. For the most part, we achieved the majority of what we set out to do for this hackathon, if on the more low-end prototype scale.

What We Learned

This hackathon, the majority of the group was new to mobile development, and enjoyed a change of pace to learn something new! We also had a chance to learn more about database management, and how to focus on different ways to reach the same solution for what we wanted to accomplish via different prototype models.

What's Next for Food@Home

In the future, we plan to give Food@Home more cross-platform compatibility, as well as to integrate a web-viewer to add on a freshness image classifier via openCV. Unfortunately, we did not have enough time to throw in a scanner and train the model with ripe vs. unripe images of a variety of food stock. In the future, we also plan to expand how many different items will be covered by this app.

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