PiCA - Pi Chef Challenge Blog #1 : Overview

Background

Some people love eating while many more people love cooking and/or baking. This cooking hobbyist is not limited to just housewives or professional chefs. There are many different reasons why they love this activity. Besides, there are also many different opinions about a fun part of cooking such as we can eat as we go, do an experiment likes a scientist, enjoy the process even just cleaning activity. Moreover, some of them, posses as an amateur chef.

However, some of these cooking lovers face a difficulty in providing a free time for this related-activities such as checking and preparing the ingredients/food material before cooking or searching/making a new receipt.  These difficulties make the people who want to cook must cancel their plan since some not-significant causes such as the ingredient is not complete and it’s too lazy for buying in that time or they have no idea about cooking menu etc.

Therefore, this project investigates the possibility of building an artificial assistance based on Raspberry Pi dedicated to cooking lovers for supporting some main cooking activities based on Raspberry Pi.  This project will give many benefits for all those who love cooking who face difficulties in time management for their hobby. We called this system as PiCA (Raspberry-Pi Based Chef Assistance)

Project Plan

Research

- The problems addressed by the project will be researched.

- The instrumentation that is needed to quantify the problems will be researched and selected.

- The challenge kit of parts will be researched with respect to using them in the project.

System Design

- Block/Concept diagram.

- Software Design.

- Power supply design.

Material Procurement

- Material needed for the project will be sourced and procured.

System Build

- Electronics build, Mechanical Build, Software programming.

Developmental Testing

- System electrical testing, System software testing, System mechanical testing.

System Application Tests and Evaluation

- The system will be used to audit my environment.

Documentation & Conclusions

- Each of the project plan tasks will include a related blog.

General System Design

The systems proposed in this challenge is designed for supporting the cooking activities and also for helping the cooking lovers for making a plan and preparing the next receipt including its ingredient. The block of diagram system proposed is shown in Fig.1 below.

Figure 1. System design concept

The systems consist of master and slave based on Raspberry-Pi.

- Master system. This sub-system also has been equipped with some components such as camera 8MP, touchscreen display, and mini microphone which is connected to Wifi router. Seeing all of those installed component, this master machine has some functions: recording and processing voice; recording and processing the video; interactively displaying the information; sending a message based on WA; and connected to the internet. This part will be installed in the fridge as the main component of the systems.

- Client machine/slave system. It will be installed by camera 8MP and PiFace Digital. This sub-system has the ability to record and process video also it can connect to other mechanical parts by digital IO. This subsystem will be placed in another area instead of the fridge in order to support the cooking activity mechanically and visually. Between Master and Slave will be connected by BLE based communication.

How it Works?

The system that we propose aims for helping the user to cook according to the planned menu. Generally, the function of this system can be divided into five including recording, checking, procuring, guiding and mechanically helping (Illustrated in Fig.2)

Figure 2. Application of proposed system

1. Registering

Firstly, the user needs to register the ingredient in the registering systems installed in the fridge. This is needed for checking the availability and counting the amount in the respect of planned next menu. This activity can be taken in the master machine.  The counting process is done by image processing based on OpenCV with blobing technique. The speech recognition based on Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) will be employed in for easing the communication in the registration process. Besides, the user also needs to register the planned menu including the ingredient needed. He can do this activity by mobile phone or desktop. The comfortable website will be developed. Therefore, he/she can do it in his/her free time before cooking.

2. Checking

Two days before the cooking day, the system will check the availability and count the amount of ingredient according to the planned menu. This checking process will run based on the recorded data in the registering process.

3. Procuring

After checking the availability and amount of ingredient, if the needed material is absent or is not enough with the receipt of the planned menu, the systems will make a procurement by sending a message (WA) to the seller/market. The confirmation is needed for completing this process. If the seller doesn't reply the request, the system will do second procurement to another seller.

4. Guiding

In the day of cooking, the system will produce an alert to remind the user of cooking. The system also provides information whether the ingredient is complete or not. The menu and receipt will be displayed on the touchscreen display.

5. Mechanically helping

The mechanical parts connected to the slave machine works in this step. However, this function is disabled and will be developed in the near future after this challenge period.

Closing Remarks

We have described the proposed design of Raspberry Pi based artificial assistance exploiting many resources. Seeing the feature of Raspberry-Pi, the proposed design will work well according to the objective and it is able to be implemented in the real application. The progress of development this proposed systems will be published in the next post in the near future. Hope our project plan works well.