SpoilRator

Inspiration

Food waste is a massive market inefficiency, where 33-50% of all food produced globally is never eaten, and the value of this wasted food is worth over $1 trillion. That's huge!

After a bit of research, we realized this issue has lacked technological experimentation to potentially solve and reduce the impacts of food waste.

We wanted to do something that has never been done before, completely unique, and potentially super impactful.

What it does

SpoilRator is an intuitive home assistant meant to keep track of food found in one's refrigerator, detect what food is fresh and spoiled, and present this information to fridge raiders then recommends recipes.

How we built it

Using Android Things, a camera takes a picture every time the fridge door opens using light sensors. This image is then sent to a Node.js server, which sends it to convolutional neural network model.

Visual Recognition returns information about the image, including what foods are present. Combined with a MySQL database, Node.js delivers metrics on how long the food has been sitting there, and what foods might have gone rotten. Furthermore, food that has been removed from the fridge will be removed from the database, so you'll always be up to date with what's being kept cold.

Using the Big Oven API, the items that are about to rot would be sent to the API and return recipes that contain these ingredients on the screen.

Challenges we ran into

Working with different skillsets and goals to approach something ideal. Working with a team of people we did not know.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We've never really used some of the languages we encountered in this project. We wanted to try something new, and are super excited and proud of how it came out.

What we learned

Tensorflow is complicated! As soon as you add any hardware, things become much harder. Coffee is our best friends.

What's next for SpoilRator

For the future, we would like to add another major feature that utilizes detected ingredients in a such a that it suggests possible recipes. This will absolutely take the SpoilRator to a whole other level.