How IoT can ensure you never run out of groceries?
Don’t you just hate it when you run out of your favourite foods? Be it your healthy cereal or your stash of chocolates, we all have that one compartment in our fridge or kitchen shelves that we keep find ourselves sticking our heads into, and it is either disappointment or frustration when we find that compartment empty.
I’m sure each and every one of us has a decent sized list of all the grocery stuff we need to purchase every second day, week or month, hovering in our minds, yet because of the clutter of thought our busy lives bring in, we usually end up reordering once we run out of what we need and find ourselves nursing an angry stomach.
With smart retailing systems like Big Basket and Grofers, Convenience in the grocery shopping industry is at its peak, bringing in a dose of relief with a few taps on our smartphone apps.
How about we add another layer of convenience to this replenish process? How do we do this? With the power of IoT of course!
Let’s list out all the stuff that house our grocery stuff:
- Fridge compartments
- Plastic containers
- Bottles
- Cans
- Shelves and its compartments
These ‘Things’ could just become our best friends in keeping a track of the volumes and quantities of our foodstuff. How? We make these containers, smarter, make them ‘sense’ what they are holding.
There are plenty of sensing devices out there such as force resistive sensors and pressure sensors which can be attached to our containers that will help us keep a tab on the volumes based on the weight or let us know the number of any item by just checking whether it is present in the compartment or not. For example, you could track the number of eggs at any given time in your egg trays.
Me, being a guy who loves to load on calories to fuel my workouts, would love to make sure I never run out of dry fruits. I could simply put a weight sensor at the bottom of my containers to track when my supply is nearing its end.
Couple these pressure and weight sensors to an IoT platform (Wi-Fi/GSM chip + Cloud for data analysis) and you have these trays/compartments keeping you informed on quantities and giving you the option to reorder. So there you go, an inventory management system for your food running on its own.
Want to get started with simple projects such as these? Try out the Bolt Internet of Things platform, designed for makers and developers to quickly build projects on IoT. Click here to purchase the Bolt IoT Platform from Amazon. There is a discount till 10th May, So Hurry-Up!
