Cuisine Assistant

Introduction

The world around us is getting smarter and smarter, the rapid growth of technology gave a new dimension to the way we perform our everyday activities and made our daily tasks easier, everything is getting automated and can be controlled remotely using your voice.

At home, the kitchen is an important place where activities in the future has a huge space for improvement in the field of home automation, nowadays, Grocery management has become a time-consuming task, we constantly monitor the kitchen grocery to avoid shortage and no matter how hard we try, sometime we have to face empty container at the time of emergency, and to avoid this, we tend to buy more than enough & most of it ends up in the trash.

What is Cuisine assistant

Cuisine assistant is asmart IOT based grocery system, it can help us to manage grocery in an efficientand seamless way, the level of solid and liquid substances are measured using load cell sensors, the quantity of the ingredient is then calculated using the its characteristics including its density, its state(solid and liquid), its packaging and more.

Structure

Demo

Objective

My main objective is to make kitchen grocery management an easier task.

• User can ask Alexa what he/she can cook and Alexa will propose a recipe based on the current grocery level and taking into consideration the ingredients expiration date to avoid waste.

• User can ask if it is possible to cook a particular food and if not, the system can generate a shopping list of the missing ingredients.

• User can ask Alexa to plane recipes for the hole week and generate a shopping list.

What is the relationship between ingredients and devices

The relationship between ingredients and devices is many to many relationship, that means an ingredient can be linked to multiple devices and vice versa.

• The reason why one ingredient can be liked to many devices is that some ingredient can be stored in different place, when we buy sugar for instance, we don’t buy only one pack, we store most of it in the storing room and a bit in the kitchen, as you may have had notice in the demo video, when Alexa is asked “how much sugar do I still have”, she responded with “5 packs of 1000 gram each in the cellar and 642 grams in the kitchen” .

• And the reason why a device can be linked to many ingredients is as it is in the demo video, the device is liked to Rice, Sugar, Pasta and Oil.

What are the main challenges to solve

My main challenge now is to solve the problem of left-over food, let’s say we want to cook something with Tomatoes, we open a tin, use some and leave the rest in the fridge, by opening the tin, the tomatoes expiration date shortens, and there for have to keep track of this ingredient. The idea I am exploring is to create a new type of device which can be placed in the fridge, it has to be linked to an ingredient by the system and not by the user.

Exploded View

CNC machining steps

Here are the steps i took to machine and build the Board, i would recommand you to start with to top, That way you can be sure the circles would be centred,

PCB Assembly

Building your own

If you are still intrested in building your own Cuisine Assistant board, you just have to build the hardware part, the rest has been taken care of including:

• The Alexa skill (here is the link the skill)

• Authentication server

• The database

• End points

• The structure (ingredients, devices and recipes)

The only thing I did not take care of is the registration and there for you will have to contact me to get access informations.