New leafs on an old tree

I used to buy a lot of thing, put them in the fridge and forget to eat. They ended up at garbage bags. Because once they are in the fridge, I easily lose the awareness of their existence. Everytime I open the frige door, I always pick the things first into my eyes, which are probobally from my latest purchase.

I wish there is a display on the fridge showing me a list where the earliest or nearest to the expire date ones are on the top. It could be a little program in the PC, but again I will forget to open it, which make the program worthless. It must be something on the fridge.

The input method is the hardest part. If I type too much, this program may be abandoned. The easier the input is, the more useful the program will be. The options I can come up are barcode scanning (This way, I should have the same database as the one used by supermaket or setup every new barcode and reuse. Or, web serves?),receipt scanning (This way, the same data could be used for my financial management.) and typing.The first 2 methods require some data re-orgnization process and manual verification. Then, everytime I take something out of the fridge, I have to update it in a convenient way.

Now, let's talk about the management. Each item in the database will be assigned a freshness period or an expire date. Along with the date I put it into the fridge, the program can determine the order of the list. An enhanced funtion could be recommending recipes according to the top items on the list.

Most of the proccssing and calculation can be done in my PC. On the fridge, there are only a LCD display (a touch screen will be too luxury), a commnunication transceiver (most likely wireless) and input devices (scanner and buttons).

# posted by comfortpoint @ 11:44 PM