xpire

xpire uses Twilio and Clarifai APIs to determine the produce you have purchased, and tell you their expiration dates.

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Inspiration

The inspiration came for this product when I was working on another school project using a similar idea, but it failed miserably. The general idea was to help eliminate food waste locally but reusing food that was "expired" but had no spoiled yet and was still very edible. xpire is a renovation of that, focusing on the single person eliminating food in their lives such that no food can go to waste.

What it does

xpire functions using Twilio and Clarifai's APIs. You send a MMS to a designated phone number, and the program takes the information about that photo and feeds it through Clarifai's photo identification process. If certain words are detected in the analysis (such as apple, carrot, and banana), it marks them down and determined the day they will go bad using a formula I leaned in school. It then sends you the date back, and when each individual item it recognized will spoil.

How I built it

I build this using Python and various API codes. I hosted this by connecting my computers server using the ngrok tunnel service, allowing anyone with the number to text it and access this service.

Challenges I ran into

Challenges I ran into included making sure that the software could identify certain foods (for example oranges are labeled as citrus). In addition, I had trouble feeding the data from the MMS from one API to another, but that was solved by using the Twilio generated link for the photo/video.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am proud that I got a basic version of this working in less than a day. It works relatively well in that it can detect and get information on six common household items.

What I learned

I learned more about API codes and the object-oriented side of python. I was used to making simple programs using urllib2, but now that I am more comfortable with API codes, I will be using them more often

What's next for xpire

I hope to expand on this and make it such that the MMS recognition is better and that it can work will more than just produce. In addition, I hope to make this something everyone can use easily with one text message to help eliminate food waste in their own home.

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