WasteWise

Inspiration

Noticing food waste at home and at restaurants

What it does

Upon arrival from the grocery store users can log products in our comprehensive database, which will store the items in a list according to expiration date.

How we built it

After many different interphases and IDEs, we finally decided on using IntelliJ with the language Python. We also used many different APIs to do real-time barcode and food recognition.

Challenges we ran into

The first issue we faced was how to select an issue whose data set size would be workable within the given time frame. Many of our ideas certainly had to capacity to be fulfilled, but within the time limit, we felt that this idea would be the best.
Another challenge we faced was choosing the interfaces. While we knew beforehand that we wished to make an app, we also knew that apps had a very major component of UI. To try to fulfill this we hoped to use Android Studio, but unfortunately seeing how the coders had no experience using this interface, we ultimately decided as a team to move forward with a console-based program.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we were able to learn many technical components such as APIs.
We also attempted to use OCRs, but unfortunately, they weren't the right fit for our app.
We are also very proud that not only have a strong technical component, but we have already begun looking toward the future of the app and how we may prototype it in the future.

What we learned

We learned how to better utilize APIs and we understood how the size of data sets can majorly affect how we code the program.

What's next for WasteWise

We plan to connect with grocery stores to automatically link purchases to the app. We also hope to implement a recipe generator to allow the user to create food using scanned ingredients. We believe that this project has the potential to expand beyond food, to items such as makeup.