CybaScan

We built CYBASCAN because we were tired of throwing away food we forgot we had. The average American household wastes roughly $1,500 in food per year, and across 130 million households that adds up to a staggering $195 billion lost annually — we wanted to actually do something about it. CYBASCAN is a smart pantry and fridge expiry tracking system where you simply scan a food item once and it reads both the barcode and the printed expiry date simultaneously using computer vision — no manual typing, no extra steps. It looks up the product automatically via the Open Food Facts API, stores everything in a database, and fires a push notification, email, or SMS alert whenever any item is custom days from expiry. We built it in Python and utilized the help of base44, Copilot, and VS code, designed a physical scanner housing in CAD to bring the full product vision to life. The biggest challenges we faced were training the scanner to reliably read expiry dates printed in wildly inconsistent formats and fonts across different packaging, handling products missing from the barcode database, and ensuring alerts fire only once per item. Through CYBASCAN, we learned how to combine computer vision, API integration, database design, and multi-channel notifications into one cohesive system — and how a real hardware design can make a software idea feel like a finished product.