Operation Pantry

Inspiration

Knowing how wildly different each student's schedule is from day to day, we wondered if students lining up to the pantry every day ever went in line, only to find themselves disappointed to see the item they wanted was gone. Students might be going home hungry, without the food they need. We then realized this problem could be solved with a little hardware hack, utilizing a weight that would send data and make it accessible through a website.

What it does

Show users real time inventory of an item at the ASUCD Pantry.

How we built it

We used an Arduino scale to get the weight of an individual item, then used that weight to calculate the total amount of items. We connected the Arduino to the Raspberry Pi through a usb port and sent data to it. We then added an LED to signal when an item is almost out of stock. It then directly sends this information to a database operated through Firebase, updating a number which indicates how many items are left. Users can then see this information as database info is transmitted to a website hosted through Firebase, updating in real time.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into issues configuring Firebase; being our first time working with it, we were confused as to how we would send data from the raspberry pi to the online database. We also ran into issues when trying to pull data from the Firebase database in real time to display on the website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Figuring out how to communicate between the raspberry pi and Firebase database was a tough but gratifying challenge, and figuring out how to transmit data from said database to a website was grueling but worth it.

What we learned

We learned how to use Firebase and use its capabilities - using it as a hosting site, along with database capabilities. We also learned how to use HTML and CSS to make a website for users to view inventory in real time.