Cooking Buddy
- 1 minI love cooking. These days I spend a lot of my free time reading up on various cooking techniques and watching videos for inspiration. I wasn’t always like this though. Although my mom is an amazing cook and growing up I would bake a box cake from time to time, somehow I didn’t pick up skills from her. My first year after I moved off campus I made the saddest meal preps involving “marinating” a kilogram of chicken and then cooking it with frozen veggies.
Suffice it to say I did not enjoy my food.
What held me back was that cooking anything more involved seemed daunting because I had images of these elaborate dishes and had no idea where to start. Not knowing where to start holds so many people back from cooking their own food. Eating out hurts their wallet while their groceries rot in the fridge and possibly even adds some unwanted pounds. So I set out to create something that would help solve this problem once and for all.
So my friends and I created the Cooking Buddy.
The Cooking Buddy automatically recognizes the ingredients you put into your fridge. As a constraint in our project which added some difficulty, we used a simple hardware camera and a weak internet connection to transfer the images. This required significant work to get it operational including some heavy compression.
Our webapp used React frontend and a MySQL database. All of this was integrated with third party APIs which allowed us to recognize various images we captured and generate recipes based on your existing ingredients.
This demo showcases the user putting an orange into their fridge, confirming the quantity, and finally seeing a new recipe, "No cook cranberry orange relish", pop up.
Siddhantha Bose
Living, learning, and meeting people along the way