What's Cookin?

Managing your fridge is hard. There's so many variables-- roommates, expiration dates, meal prepping-- when can you find time to keep track of it all? What's Cookin' can help you do just that!

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Inspiration

As the creators, we wanted to solve a problem that we face every day! We're roommates, and have the problem of remembering what's in our fridge. When we go out to do groceries, often times we buy duplicates of things because the other roommate is busy, or we don't have time to sort through what's in our fridge. Some food can go bad because of our poor fridge management, and some things can go to waste. This is a common problem among young adults, as the transition from your youth to adulthood can be overwhelming!

What it does

What's Cookin? eliminates one more thing to worry about in your young-adult life! It monitors your fridge each day and tracks what's inside, and how many items you have, and it can flag for expired food!

What's Cookin (as we intend it to be, but not currently) uses a camera installed in your fridge and takes a snapshot of the items inside once at the end of the day! It uses computer vision to see what's inside your fridge and updates our database with all your items (what food items you have, how many of each do you have). It also can track if your food looks expired, or if your food has been in the fridge for too long, it'll alert you!

How we built it

We utilized a Python backend, a React frontend and a Supabase DB to manage all our incoming data. We intended to utilize an external API for computer vision, but we ended up being restricted by paywalls. For this specific project, we simulated what it would be like if we did end up successfully utilizing CV!

Challenges we ran into

Mentioned before, we were unable to access an API for CV. Thus, our application only works with dummy data. However, we designed it in a way to that it's possible to hook up the app to an API (once we find one :))

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We learned a lot along the way! We're super proud of connecting our backend to our frontend, writing API endpoints, and learning different methods of testing. Half of our team are beginner hackers, and we think we learned a LOT!

What we learned

We basically had to teach ourselves React and Javascript, along with learning about how APIs work, and how to write endpoints. We learned SO much about React Routes and pages, and a lot about databases too!

What's next for What's Cookin?

Firstly, we'd like to research camera options to make this app fully functional-- a camera that can withstand the cold temperatures of your fridge is what we'd need. We'd also need to be able to program the camera to communicate with our app!

We hope to implement diet tracking and smart tracking for our food! Currently, we set up our app to track dates and times when food leaves or enters the fridge, and we'd like to find a way to utilize this data to recommend recipes when food is nearing expiration!

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