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Many of us have suffered the common experience of buying a great deal of (now very expensive) food, only to have it go off before it can be consumed. [ptallthings93] has whipped up a simple device to try and tackle this problem.
The result is DecayDock, which lives on a fridge and tries to keep track of what’s going on inside. It achieves this with the use of an ESP32-CAM module, which combines the capable microcontroller with a camera for image detection work. With the aid of an Edge AI model, it’s able to detect common food items that are held in front of the camera, which are in turn added to an internal inventory. The items are tracked over time based on expected shelf lives, and the freshness of various items in the fridge is displayed on an attached LCD screen with a green/yellow/red color coding system.
The system is only making estimates—it’s not able to actually identify when the cheese has gone moldy or the milk has gone sour. Still, if you struggle to remember what you should be prioritizing to use in your fridge, it might be a handy aid.
Ultimately, we never really saw smart fridges dominate the market, even though the idea has long been a popular one in futurist circles. Perhaps none of them thought that nobody really wants to stand staring down at a screen on the fridge all day. In reality, some areas of the home are best left unsmartified.
