Fridge Shopping

Get the list of stuffs you don't have in your home - when you're away from home!

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Inspiration

  • When out for shopping, sometimes we realize that we forgot most of the things that we really should have bought and spent ton of money on what was already in the fridge. There are manual ways to fix this -- some people just create a "to-shop" list beforehand. But what if our smartphone or smartwatch could seamlessly keep track of all the supplies in our fridge, our kitchen, home and office? What if they could inform us, accurately, what's in the fridge at any given instance? That's where "Fridge Shopping" fits in!

What it does

Fridge Shopping keeps an eye on (literally) food supplies inside your kitchen. When you're around a shopping center or grocery store, it automatically send you a list of all the items you currently have in your home. The list of items appears on your Pebble smartwatch which is easily accessible on your wrist. The automated smart list is with you the entire time you're out shopping, making sure you don't miss a thing on your "to-shop" list.

How we built it

  • Set of cameras in your home take photos of food items in your kitchen, or fridge.
  • Using IBM's Visual Recognition, we "recognize" what the food times are in real time, creating a list of those items.
  • The list is then pushed to cloud database on Firebase.
  • Your smartphone is notified and downloads the updated list from Firebase - which is then transmitted to the Pebble watch via Bluetooth.
  • Whenever you're outside your home - using Geo-location and Google Places For Web API - your smartphone suggests probable shopping destinations and displays them on your Pebble. You can browse the list of items that you have in your kitchen while you shop - being confident that you're only buying the right items in right quantity.

Challenges we ran into

  • None of us had ever used or hacked Pebble before. As a result, hours went by just to figure out where we should start from. We had some mentors who helped us. We learned to use CloudPebble, which was simple to use but really full of glitch. Also we mashed up many smaller ideas we had to build a bigger product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Most of our time was invested in troubleshooting Pebble bugs. We're glad we learned and solved most of those glitches.

What we learned

  • How to build stuffs with Pebble.
  • A bit more of Node.
  • Mashing up entirely different things into an almost coherent hack.

What's next for Fridge Shopping

  • A dedicated mobile app that fits perfectly with Pebble.
  • Multiple cameras, multiple images from multiple angles to accurately recognize the items.

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