Smart Fridge

Forget the hassle of forgetting. Save money, time, and food with Smart Fridge!

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Inspiration

Americans waste 27 millions tons of food every single year. There is a huge waste problem in this country and the first step to solving this issue is utilizing what we have to its maximum. Three main issues contribute to the problem of food waste:

  1. We lose track of the food we have and it ends up spoiling

  2. We buy ingredients we already have, wasting our money and increasing our stockpile of unused food.

  3. We forget to buy the ingredients we do need, making home cooking a chore.

These challenges can be solved by taking proper inventory of what food we already have. Our solution is Smart Fridge.

What it does

Smart Fridge allow you to keep inventory of you Fridge right on your phone. You can receive live updates on the contents of your fridge through our IOS app. Additionally, Smart Fridge can connect to your Amazon Fresh account so you can automate the purchasing of your food as you need it. Most importantly, to help you utilize the ingredients you have, Smart Fridge can give you recipes that you can cook with the food you already have! Smart Fridge will allow your home kitchen to function with the production and cost efficiency of a commercial one with minimal effort!

How we built it

For this competition, we focused mainly on creating the IOS app and the server that connects the fridge to the phone. To simulate input from that might be received from the fridge, we used a Raspberry Pie connected to a Node.js server with a MongoDB back end. Whenever the Raspberry Pie detects an event, it is sent to the server which connects from the Google Cloud Platform to our IOS app. The Google Cloud Platform is essential for hosting our back end. We used amazon's shopping cart API so that the app can automatically place the items in your shopping cart as you need them. Lastly we used the Food2Fork API to access a list of all the recipes you can make with the current contents of your fridge.

Challenges we ran into

We face three main challenges as we were developing Smart Fridge:

  1. Integrating Amazon web store
  2. Getting Data from the Website due to 304 error
  3. Raspberry Pi connection

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud that we were able to connect our Raspberry Pi to our final application. It was a huge challenge to connect all the pieces together, however, we are very happy with our final product and we are excited for the future developments.

What we learned

  1. Get Express and Node.js working at the same time
  2. How to deploy a MongoDB serve and get data from it
  3. How to supply data to a server from a raspberry pi
  4. Learning about IOS development.

What's next for Smart Fridge

In the future, we would like to fully develop a way to monitor the contents of a fridge. Potentially, we could use an image classification system to take pictures of the contents of the fridge to determine them, we were not able to implement this feature this competition. Also, we would like to increase accessibility to our product by integrating Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant.

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