Fridge Simulator 2023

Inspiration

It's a familiar experience to many students, opening the fridge to find a strange smell coming from some long-forgotten expired food. Dealing with the varying expiry dates of each food product without forgetting is impossible, especially for large families that store a significant amount of food in their fridges.

What it does

This app displays the food/products users have in their fridge and freezer with their date of expiry and putting the food expiring soonest at the front. There's also the option to send notification when a product is about to expire.

How we built it

Using Node.js as a backend with Prisma as the ORM connecting to PostgreSQL hosted on Google Cloud and using Express for handling requests. The frontend is built with React, auth0 for authentications and react-unity-webgl for running Unity in react.

Challenges we ran into

Working with Django for the backend of the app. Making Unity interact with React

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Made a 3D fridge in Unity Patched Unity's WebGL build to work around react-unity-webgl bugs Got something running on mobile, even if not fully functional Wrote a working backend

What we learned

Node.js backends are a lot easier to deal with than Django when you're running low on sleep, and React is difficult.

What's next for Fridge Simulator 2023

In the future, we'd like to automatically generate recipes based on the products that are expiring soon in the fridge. A big part of why food goes to waste is because it can be difficult to find recipes that use what you have without requiring extra ingredients, and an app could help with that. Additionally, we'd like to make the experience of adding products to the virtual fridge easier by scanning product barcodes and automatically determining product information. We experimented with this but were unable to get barcodes scanning reliably.

Built With

• domain.com
• github
• google-cloud
• node.js
• postgresql
• prisma
• react
• unity