iKitchen

Inspiration

Suffering from forgetfulness has become very common in our consumer culture. Often the most cluttered place in many households is the kitchen. With food piled high in cabinets and stuck in the back of refrigerators, it seems expired food may go left alone in a dark corner for years with no one knowing, forever taking up precious space. Additionally, lost food could result in someone’s buying unnecessary extra food. This being something we all deal with, we decided that measures should be taken to organize our food. A simple way to do this is to document and sort all food into an inventory, where you can find all of the food that you have in your kitchen. With this information, there are many possibilities including dietary control and recipe suggestions. We decided this would be useful and so we decided to create iKitchen.

What it does

iKitchen is an inventory app which allows the user to easily add food by scanning barcodes. After the barcode is scanned, the app receives info from the barcode, such as nutrition facts and product name which is then stored in an organized inventory.

How we built it

We used Ionic Framework to incorporate HTML, CSS, and Angular JavaScript to create our project. First we used an API to scan barcodes from the app and retrieve the 12 digit UPC code from the food product. Then we used a library that took a UPC code as a parameter and returned the nutrition information of the food in an XML. Finally we used JavaScript to access and store this information in an organized inventory within the application.

Challenges we ran into

We had to download about an hour and a half worth of updates to be able to run XCode.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to create our first mobile application which can be installed on various iOS devices.

What we learned

This being most of our first time creating a web app, we learned a lot about this new style of application building. While there are many similarities to web development, which we have more experience with, many key differences between the two types of projects surprised us. But we learned a lot about the differences and the structure of web applications.