Fridgi

Fridgi

LedgeLab

Computer Systems Technology - Software Development and Network Engineering

12/08/2020

Fridgi is a cross-platform mobile application that aims to be your all-in-one kitchen inventory tracker, shopping list manager, and recipe suggester. A friend to aspiring home chefs everywhere, Fridgi makes it easy to keep track of the ingredients in your refrigerator and pantry, and get recipe suggestions based on what you have on hand.

Fridgi was designed to run on both Android and iOS using the Flutter framework. Fridgi is backed by an ASP.NET Core Web API which is responsible for most of the business logic and is integrated with a number of Google Cloud Services. Our primary datastore is a NoSQL database provided by Google Cloud Firestore, while files, such as user-supplied images, are stored remotely in Google Cloud Storage. Our image recognition feature is powered by Google Cloud Vision API, while our user authentication and authorization is managed with Firebase Authentication. Our API also employs two non-Google APIs: Spoonacular and UPCitemDB. Spoonacular is a food management system with a robust API which we use for recipe suggestions and ingredient identification. UPCitemDB is a queryable UPC database which we use for in-app barcode scanning.

Presently, we have implemented all of our planned features, including ingredient inventory management, shopping list management, image recognition, and recipe management. As for the future of Fridgi, we have agreed as a group to cease development and support after graduation.

Fridgi was first devised in our Capstone Prototype course. Design decisions pertaining to the project were directly or indirectly informed by nearly every class we took that semester: Capstone Prototype, Advanced .NET Server-Side Technologies, and Software Process Management, Innovation: From Idea to Execution and Android Application Development.

Our group brainstormed many different ideas in our Capstone Prototype and Innovation classes before settling on the recipe recommendation and inventory management application that would eventually become Fridgi. Recipe recommendation and inventory management appealed to our group for three primary reasons: first, it sought to solve a problem with which we had first-hand experience - namely, not knowing what to make for dinner. Second, it seemed the most feasible and well-defined of the ideas we had generated, which we felt was ideal for a Capstone project - we wanted to ensure we could finish the project on time and to a high degree of quality.

Finally, the project would give us an opportunity to learn new skills and work with novel technologies, which was a priority for all group members. Throughout the semester, our Capstone Prototype advisor, John Wang, helped us to refine our vision. We chose our technologies according to what would best serve our application, what we were most familiar with, what we were being taught, and what we wanted to learn. Over the course of Capstone Prototype, we were able to design and deliver a working prototype version with inventory management, image recognition, and barcode-scanning functionality. In our present Capstone Project, under the guidance of our advisor Kevin Forest, our team has worked in sprints to complete all of the major features of Fridgi.

Team LedgeLab is a group of four Software Development & Network Engineering students at Sheridan College united by a passion for software development and a shared goal of designing, developing, and delivering a robust, well-rounded application for our final-semester Capstone course. Though the skills of our individual members differ, as a collective we have experience in both front- and back-end application design and development, as well as UI/UX design and mobile development.