Homart

• 

  Full product

• 

• 

  White light notifying "item in stock"

• 

  App interface

Inspiration

In this busy world, we tend to forget to take into account of small things like remembering how much food is left in our kitchen and during shopping we tend to forget things that are really empty in our kitchen. Sometimes we might even end up buying things excessively. So, our solution is to design a technology to assist people in shopping the things at their fingertips by notifying in their smartphones about which items to buy and how much item is left in the kitchen.

What it does

It is a simple home automation. It is designed to notify users (Shoppers) during shopping to find out list of items that is running out of stock in their kitchen. It automatically notifies the user to go for grocery shopping by calculating the stock of grocery.

How I built it

We built the sensor using Arduino. A distance sensor is used which detects the level of grocery in the container. We have connected the sensor with our application using Bluetooth. Bluetooth is used to transfer data between the chip and the mobile application. Whenever the level of items in container decreases, it sends a real-time notification to mobile application stating the need for shopping.

Challenges we ran into

We tried to integrate WiFi for sending data remotely but lack of hardware chips stopped us. We tried to make a cross-platform mobile application using Ionic framework and Cordova plugins but because of problems in integrating the Bluetooth in application, we faced problems. We had to switch to MIT app Inventor to make application after encountering with that problem.

Accomplishments that we are proud of:

We are proud of building a real world application that automates the kitchen. We are proud of building a minimum viable product that solves our day to day problem using IoT and mobile technologies.

What we learned:

We learned to use Arduino and Internet of Things (IoT) to build real world applications. We learnt to develop mobile application using MIT App Inventor.

What's next for Homart :

We will build a cross platform mobile application- both for android and ios- using Ionic and Cordova. We are also going to use load sensors instead of ultrasonic sensors that will help to get better accuracy. A little modification in casing of our product look will help in using the device effectively. We will use WiFi instead of Bluetooth to send data remotely to users so that customers can look about the conditions of their grocery at any place at any time and plan for shopping accordingly. Our long term plan is to use this product in kitchens, or shopping stores to notify the owner to refill the stock when the food item gets less or empty.

Built With

• arduino
• bluetooth
• hc05
• mit-app-inventor
• ultrasonic-sensor