Lekha’s Status Report for 02/15/25

Work Accomplished:

This week, I focused on the hardware design aspects. We took a trip to ALDI on Thursday in order to mimic the customer experience and decided to make changes to our original proposal.

1. New Hardware Design
   1. Barcode Scanner – $40
   2. Rasberry Pi
      • main controller / sync with mobile app
   3. Battery Pack
2. System Flow
   1. User scans item (Barcode Scanner -> Rasberry Pi)
   2. Look up barcode in local database
   3. Extract Product Info
   4. Update App Data
   5. Display on App
3. Database
   1. online API providing ALDI UPC (public)
   2. select subset of items
   3. Exceptions: some produce did not have barcodes. We will selectively leave them out for the scope of this project as there were not many of these products.

Progress Status:

Due to changing the product design, I am behind on the original schedule that involved setting up the Jetson and camera. However, a new schedule has been made with the new design concepts in light of the change, which should keep us on track for the MVP.

Next Week’s Goal:

• Reserve Rasberry Pi and request for Barcode Scanner
• Build local database of Aldi inventory (web scraping)
  • collect UPC and allergen info etc
• CAD Prototype of clip-on device (casing + power supply)