Inspiration
A good knowledge of what happens in your kitchen is surprisingly important. Over a third of Americans are overweight, and with that comes a plethora of health problems later in life. We thought that it was a little too hard to eat healthy even in one's home, and we set out to fix that.
What it does
Man(a)ger keeps tabs on what happens in your kitchen and provides you with analytics regarding how your household is eating. When you buy or consume food, simply wave it past Man(a)ger and it'll add it to its database. Later, head online and find what percentage of your food consumption is sugars, protein, fats, etc. Manager will also automatically reorder food when you run out of it, making restocking your home easier than ever.
How we built it
We have a hardware box which contains a Raspberry Pi running Linux, a speaker, a webcam, a button, and a powered USB hub to keep it all running inside. We communicate between the Python on the Pi, a DigitalOcean server, and a MySQL database which do all of the external computation and storage and update to the website. The API is publicly available as well, and we're excited to see what other people will do with it!
Challenges we ran into
Accurate and continuous bar-code detection is surprisingly difficult to do. We also found that integrating our Python with our PHP was more of a challenge than we had anticipated, and calling speech synth from the Raspberry Pi also turned out to be a headache.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're very proud of competing our first project utilizing hardware as well as software! We think that our product is pretty (in its own way), and we're also excited to have built something we feel we would use ourselves.
What we learned
We've learned that having a good specification written out beforehand would be an invaluable tool in designing and building these products.
What's next for Man(a)ger
We'd like to integrate with more stores for delivery and improve logistics within the code to simplify the adding of additional Man(a)ger bots to the network.
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