ProvisionsPro — food waste reduction on Ring

Inspiration

We noticed how many households throw away food simply because they forget what is stored in their cupboards. We wanted to use existing smart hardware like Ring to provide proactive visibility into kitchen inventory. Our goal was to turn a standard security camera into an intelligent inventory management tool.

What it does

ProvisionsPro monitors feeds from Ring devices to identify food items and track their quantities. It alerts users when items are nearing their expiration dates or when stock is low. The system helps families save money and preventing unnecessary purchases and environmental waste.

How we built it

We deployed our microservices on amazon-eks to ensure scalable processing of video frames. We used amazon-sagemaker for training our object detection models and haystack for orchestrating the retrieval-augmented generation of inventory data. The core logic is written in Python and interfaces with the pantry and provisionspro modules.

Challenges we ran into

Handling real-time video streams from Ring without causing high latency was a significant hurdle. We also struggled with optimizing the model to recognize similar-looking packaging across different brands. Balancing the notification frequency with API rate limits required careful tuning of our polling logic.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully integrated amazon-ring with our custom vision pipeline to provide seamless inventory updates. We are proud of the accuracy we achieved in identifying items under varying lighting conditions. Our architecture on amazon-eks proved robust in handling multiple concurrent camera streams.

What we learned

We learned much about the nuances of edge-to-cloud processing for vision applications. We gained deep experience in how to use haystack to manage complex data relationships for inventory. Understanding the specific constraints of the Ring API helped us write more efficient data processing scripts.

What's next for ProvisionsPro

We plan to implement automated recipe suggestions based on items that are about to expire. We also hope to expand our support to a wider variety of Ring devices for better kitchen coverage. Our ultimate vision is to make zero-waste kitchens the standard for every household.

Built With

• amazon-eks
• amazon-ring
• haystack
• pantry
• provisionspro
• sagemaker