Inspiration
Opening the fridge and looking around wastes energy. Having a list of items inside your fridge prevents you from triggering the largest loss of energy for your refrigerator. If you can’t remember when you bought, for example milk, this will prevent you from drinking old milk.
What it does
Scanner that keeps an inventory of what is in your refrigerator. You scan items in and out of your fridge. Keeps track of how long you have had certain items. A camera captures the bar-code of products and looks for it in the database. If there is a match it will show you what the product is based on the bar code. It stores the day it was scanned in and it has an estimated expiration date for products such as milk. It tells you how many days until your product will potentially go bad.
How we built it
Our scanner system consists of a raspberry pi with a webcam that is triggered by an old guitar pedal button that is wired directly to the GPIO. A simple Python function was used to facilitate the button being pushed thus triggering the camera.The image is then saved into a temporary local file folder. The image is sent to HPE Haven ondemand barcode recognition API via an http request to retrieve the data using Curl. The return from this request was stored in a JSON file and parced into our framework. Then it is checked against the database to retrieve the additional information such as the item name and expiration date. We are using SFML to create a front-end for the program. The database was also developed in a txt file.
Challenges we ran into
Problems that we ran into included the C++ implementation of the API data in both the bar-code recognition and Curl API. We also had a problem with the implementation of the bar-code database as well. These issues took many hours to solve. Our camera also couldn't take pictures with enough resolution to actually use the bar-code in the API. We had to use carefully taken cell phone pictures of the bar-codes to actually run the program successfully.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Honestly, we are proud of how the whole program came together. The API implementation into C++ was especially impressive.
What we learned
To tackle a project from both the back-end and the front-end to implement our own API was intense and immensely powerful.
What's next for Fridge Friend
This product we designed was originally meant for small scale use in a household refrigerator, but this API could potentially have even bigger applications. Our intuitive inventory could be used in a warehouse to track not only the amount of items, but their shelf lives and expiration dates as well. This could be used for perishables like food or other vital chemicals and medicines as well.
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