Ship #1 Pending review

@theodora on Pantry_Scanner · about 1 month ago

Finally, I finished my first version of my pantry scanner. Due to camera quality, sometimes it can read the expiry date; sometimes it can’t, but I already tried my best to make it work

What I actually built

–Firmware on ESP32-CAM: press a button, it captures a photo and uploads it over WI-Fi
– A local Python backend that reads the photo, tries OCR for the expiry date, attempts barcode decoding using an external API and saves everything to a database
– A web dashboard showing every scanned item sorted by soonest-expiring first, with edit and remove buttons for fixing up anything the camera couldn’t capture

The hard part

The hardest part is to get the camera to read text and turn it into the dashboard. I went through extensive debugging, more than I have recorded in the devlog. Fixing the lens, dealing with blur, and looking at the barcode-decoding problem, it turned out the camera quality is the major issue.

Next Step

– Use a dedicated barcode scanner instead of relying on the camera
–Create a fixed scanning stand using 3D printing for more consistent capture quality than hand positioning.
– Attach a macro lens attachment for the camera to improve small print in OCR

5 devlogs
20h build

Video of Project → See source code →

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@theodora on Pantry_Scanner · about 1 month ago

3h 44m 43s logged

Devlog 5:

Finally, I finish my first version of my pantry scanner, due to camera quality, sometime it can read the expiry date, sometime it can’t, but I already try my best to make it work.
I can’t film the whole process, but I try to snip a bit of how this camera actually work in screenshot and a video

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@theodora on Pantry_Scanner · about 1 month ago

1h 14m 20s logged

Devlog 4:

Today, I connected the front and back end; however, the camera quality wasn’t as good as I expected, and it couldn’t scan the barcode to retrieve the data. Now, I am rethinking how to retrieve the data and what the next step should be.

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@theodora on Pantry_Scanner · about 1 month ago

9h 28m 29s logged

Devlog3:

##Working on front end
My front end is using Python as the main language, alongside html and css, the website look plain as I just built the basic version
Next step: connect front end and back end

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@theodora on Pantry_Scanner · about 2 months ago

1h 47m 18s logged

Devlog 2:

This devlog, it records how the front end works. I use arduino IDE with coding language C+ to make the ESP32 Camera work, It can capture 1600x1200px, which is useful for the backend.
The backend is used to store the captured picture and analyse the expiry date of the food.

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@theodora on Pantry_Scanner · about 2 months ago

3h 58m 50s logged

#Devlog 1:
Hi, welcome to a hardware project devlog. In this project, I am creating a pantry scanner. I have drawn my schematic board and am soldering the PCB. I forgot to record my soldering part, but here is the overview of the project.