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Resourceful
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Facts
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Inspiration
As co-op students constantly living alone and on-the-go, we like to travel and try new delicious dishes. However, we got frustrated with all the food that was being thrown to waste. The main reasons why this was happening, as we found out, was because a lot of ingredients we bought were used once in a while, for very specific culinary dishes.
You either throw it away, or restrict yourself to eating only asparagus sprouts for the rest of the month!
France and Italy are among the first countries to pass a law that forbids food supply chains to throw out "waste food" (which is really not waste food). We decided that we could contribute to the growing movement, even if we do that by the means of a two-day hackathon invention - and so the idea for Resourceful was born.
What it does
Resourceful lets users look inside their fridge and simultaneously ask Amazon Alexa what dishes could be made with the products they have. Alexa then processes the given data and returns the best match to the user.
How We built it
First of all, we did a lengthy research on which food-related APIs to use, as there are dozens of them, and all return various things or require a considerable amount of time for approval. Then we picked out our needed software tools, which were Eclipse with Maven - to be able to deploy under a .JAR file to AWS.
We started by building up from the endpoints of both parts to the program. When we had our Alexa Skill and our Edamam Requestor ready, we merged the two codebases, plugged the corresponding parts and deployed the entire thing to Amazon-Web-Services.
Lastly, we made our code presentable and thoroughly tested the software by quizzing Alexa with various ingredients.
Challenges We ran into
All of us would agree that the hardest part of the project was the tiny but dangerous step of merging the code and deploying it to AWS. And to be frank, this tiny step took 50% of our hack time. We ran into problems that wouldn't have solutions or any kind of mention on forums, and we also ran into the infamous Java ClassNotFoundException. We had to dig very deep to find the solution to this problem.
Accomplishments that We're proud of
Getting AWS to work without the ClassNotFoundException! And getting the entire project to run on Java even though Node.js would have been a much smoother process.
What We learned
That Peterborough is very proactive on recycling and preserving the environment!
That we might have to plan ahead next time and request access as early as possible, if we decide to use third-party services.
That it's always good to search for solutions to a problem where you least expect it... Especially with compilers and IDEs :)
What's next for Resourceful
We hope it helps at least one person to save food from wasting away. And we hope it helps people eat healthy, eat deliciously and eat ethically.
We might consider taking Resourceful further, as we had some ideas for features we had to hold back for the hackathon.
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