One of the things I’ve enjoyed over the past few months of living with the girlfriend has been her propensity to use Ocado and other online shopping sites (MySuperMarket too) for our online shopping. This has saved me hours of grief in the supermarket, and also allowed us to get some great deals and make good savings on our purchases.
One of the frustrations I have still though, is our monthly ‘food audit’ where we go through all the cupboards to make sure there are no bits of food that we’ve forgotten about, that everything is still in date, so that the other half can work through the food by creating some meal plans.
This is all great, but as a technical minded person, there’s a better solution. What if I could do a one-off food-audit, then get the meal-planner to allocate the food from this audit into the recipes to provide me stock levels? What if I could get the Ocado shop to automatically add the shopping that’s delivered to the database? What if, using food that’s ‘nearing expiry’ I could automatically create meal plans based on the food available?
Now, I’m sure I don’t have the programming skills, or resources, to make this a foolproof system, but I’m pretty sure I can get a loose enough framework to at least manage our stock levels in our kitchen. If I could also interface with UPC barcodes (and create a mobile interface for scanning products with the phone’s camera), then I could get the other half to scan the products that she uses for each recipe.
Now, I’m also using this as a learning exercise for learning symfony2, behat, and phpunit testing. If you have the time to help out, I’m keeping this project open source so that others can muck-in and benefit. In terms of hardware required, all that’s needed is a webserver, mysql database and android phone.
The start of the code is up at https://github.com/andylockran/ShopManager - if you have the time and want this yourself, then please feel free to get in touch. The more people I have to learn off the better!
