Golden Gate Fridge

Inspiration

As college students we often forget about what's in our fridge. Those eggs you bought a month ago and that milk from weeks ago often goes unnoticed. Before you know it you're having to throw out these groceries because they've gone bad. We wanted to build a mobile app that would help prevent this. We knew we wanted to build something for the health and wellness track because we're always looking for ways to maintain and promotoe a healthier lifestyle especially with our busy lives.

What it does

The idea is very simple: you go to the grocery store and once you buy your groceries you can just scan the barcode of all the groceries you bought. The app will catalog your items and sort them by expiration date. As your items get closer to expiry, push notifications will remind you to enjoy your food while you still can.

How we built it

We learned how to use Ionic to build a mobile app. We assigned a topic/feature to each person to become an expert in. Then we helped each other by teaching each other what we learned. This allowed us to be really efficient because we didn't really get completely stuck on anything because multiple people were attacking a problem at once. We used the Cordova camera plugin to do the barcode scanning. We also used Google's Firebase cloud to allow application data to be to be synced across multiple clients.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was trying to figure out how to get the necessary data from the UPCItemDB API. We all tried working on this for a really long time. There wasn't much documentation so we couldn't figure out how to obtain values we needed (names of products from barcode scans). It took up a large part of our time. Another challenge was having to keep testing on our phones.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we were able to build an user-based system in such a short amount time especially because none of us had experience with doing something like that before. It turned out really well and we can't wait to use it even more in the future.

What we learned

We learned many technical skills like how to use Ionic and Firebase. None of us had used either of these before so we were really learning as we went. We also learned the power of teamwork because we made sure to help each other out whenever someone got stuck. This allowed us to maximize our learning and productivity. We also learned how important quality is over quantity. We decided to go for a couple features and make them as efficient as they could be instead of trying all our ideas and not getting through them fully.

What's next for Golden Gate Fridge

We have a ton of features planned for the future!!! We're definitely going to continue working on this even after this hackathon ends. Some new features would include:

sharing your grocery list/pantry with friends
color warning when items are near the expiration date (red, yellow, green), red being expiring today, yellow being in a couple of days, and green anything more than that
nutrition facts for each item as well, health trends of grocery purchases