S.H.E.L.F. - Plans and Ideas - Pi Chef Design Challenge - Blog post #1

For who is this project meant for (and how will it help)?

Ever went to the store and started thinking if you had some ingredient at home, or even worse came back home with your hands full of groceries ready to prepare that meal you've been wanting to make for so long just to see that you were wrong when you thought that you had that ingredient that you didn't buy? Or you just maybe want to keep track of how much something you consume. The idea of this project is to make a low cost smart shelf which would update you on your stock levels by sending the data to an Android app.

How will it work?

The center of the whole project would be the Raspberry Pi as the central brain which will communicate with the sensors and the internet. The shelf itself will be supported with scale sensors which will keep track of the weight, while a camera module above will monitor what is put on the shelf itself. To identify the different things on the shelf the most likely route for something like that would be either stickers for the packaging or specially designed containers (the progress of the project will determine). The idea of the stickers is to have cheap intuitive stickers of what is what, which would be recognized by the camera module. Of course making a sticker for everything would be impossible so the user will be able to match "blank" stickers to the desired thing using the app (By blank - the stickers will be universal; for example a number a person can read with the symbols around which would help the camera module). The user could print out there whenever he runs out. The other idea is having specially designed containers with some sort of sensor detecting what that is (Strict location for an ingredient for example). How the project and time work out will determine the way that I'll develop the project. The idea is also to make it possible to connect it to other shelves like this and adding other features that could be lights, smoke and temperature sensors, or anything else that would help around the kitchen. If this all goes well, the finishing part would be a heavy duty storage area, which would house vegetables with climate control (temperature, humidity, fresh air).

This is just a fast picture I made, and not close to the final design, I will have 3D models when i finish designing it

Some of the bigger challenges with the project

1. Making the whole user friendly
   • Making it easy to use
   • Making it robust for everyday use
   • Making it easy to clean/assemble/disassemble
2. Working with the camera and the stickers
3. Making it low cost
4. Multiple shelves working in tandem

Things that need to be done (probably will change with time)

1. Completing the design (most of it done)
2. Gathering the materials (need to get the scale sensors and the raw materials themselves like wood)
3. Simple Android app (will have a list of items with how much is left)
4. Sending data to the web via Raspberry
5. Connecting everything (Android-Internet-Raspberry-Arduino-Sensors)
6. Sensor calibration
7. Computer vision
8. Making and testing the computer vision with the stickers
9. Building a first prototype
10. Troubleshooting
11. Adding features

In the end I would just like to say congrats to all the starter kit winners and to wish good luck to everyone!!! Unfortunately I didn't have much time to actually start doing anything more serious except gathering some of the stuff, it's the finals week for me at university so it's pretty fun here! Thanks for reading the post and if anyone has any comments on what's bad/good/something they would add, I would love to hear it!

Milos