Smartie Solutions By Smartie Home — Add to Grocery List
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Here is my experience with the SwitchBot NFC Tag and how sadly it did not give me a smart solution for the household.
The Issue
Post COVID our grocery shopping process has changed, during COVID we had a recurring process of using the PC Express grocery app to order our groceries to pick up and bring them home. Now our grocery store process is up in the air but we still use the PC Express app as our grocery list (even if we don’t click order). We get groceries from any process or store now, even looking at the best place to shop due to current deals. Our baby son loves fruit but we can’t all just tackle Costco weekly for those deals on fruit.
Where this process of any store falls apart is, when we individually think about something to add to the list while cooking or run out of something and we sometimes forget to add it to the list. Now if one person realizes but doesn’t put it on the list and the other person goes to get grocery….oh no forgot something.
This leads to either another trip to the grocery store (which includes additional purchases like chips or snacks) or a change in meal plans for the week.
The Theory
If we had a NFC tag on the fridge, we could just scan our phone which will open the PC Express app to add items quickly to our shopping list.
The Failed Attempt
Now NFC scanners are not new, they have been around for a long time. I purchased a pack of SwitchBot NFC tags which support Siri Shortcuts. I set one up in Siri Shortcuts to open the PC Express app and everything worked as intended, for my phone at least.
However, after testing with another device in the house (which triggers the standard “Open SwitchBot website” for other devices). I discovered that the shortcut was linked to my own personal device. As I was poking around to support an extension into the Home you need to buy a SwitchBot Hub Mini (Another $ 49.99 CAD) to support shared processes. And since it was using Siri Shortcuts instead of triggering a device in the house (like turning on lights or unlocking doors) the functionality kind of falls short.
This is what broke the possibility as this was supposed to be a quick and cheap solution. But to share the actions with the home for other phones in the house to work with the tag, it would need this extension for it to work.
Before returning the product I did think of a secondary solution, I could set up multiple NFC tags with Siri Shortcuts that open the PC Express app individually for every device in the house but that begins to seem more like overkill than anything else.
The Product
SwitchBot NFC Tag
Sadly this solution did not pan out, but never the less I tried to use a solution but it didn’t help with our setup for the home. If you have one phone for everything in the house then this solution might work for you, but sadly not for ours.
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