Getting your fridge to order food for you with a RPi camera and a hacked up Instacart API

This is a detailed post on how to get your fridge to autonomously order fruit for you when you are low.  An RPi takes a picture every day and detects if you have fruit or not using my Caffe web query code. If your fridge is low on fruit, it orders fruit using Instacart, which is then delivered to your house. You can find the code with a walk through here:
https://github.com/StevenHickson/AutonomousFridge

Some of my posts are things I end up using every day and some are proof of concepts that I think are interesting. This is one of the latter. When I was younger, I heard an urban legend that Bill Gates had a fridge that ordered food for him and delivered it same-day whenever he was low. That story always intrigued me and I finally decided to implement a proof of concept of it. Below is how I set about doing this.

Hacking up an Instacart API

The first thing we need is a service that picks out food and delivers it to you. There are many of these, but as I live in Atlanta, I chose Instacart. Now we need an API. Unfortunately, Instacart doesnt provide one, so we will need to make our own. 

Head over to instacart.com and set up an account and login. Then right click and view source. You are looking for a line in the source like this:
FirebaseUrl="https://instacart.firebaseio.com/carts/SOME_HASH_STRING_HERE

That string is what you need to access your instacart account. Open up a terminal and type:

curl https://instacart.firebaseio.com/carts/YOUR_HASH_STRING.json

You should get back a response that looks like this:

{"checkout_state":{"workflow_state":"shopping"},"items":{"1069829":{"created_at":1.409336316211E9,"qty":1,"user_id":YOUR_USER_ID}},"users":{"-JXAzAp6rgtM4u2dV2tI":{"id":YOUR_USER_ID"name":"StevenH"},"-Jj2_kFsu5hvZRhx4KX1":{"id":YOUR_USER_ID,"name":"Steven H"},"-Jp8VvDusSDOyEiJ0J5D":{"id":YOUR_USER_ID,"name":"Steven H"}}}

Now we just need to figure out what different items are. Pick a store and start adding items to your cart and run the same command. If I add some fruit (oranges, bananas, strawberries, pears) to my cart and then run the same curl request. I get something like this:

{"checkout_state":{"workflow_state":"shopping"},"items":{"1069829":{"created_at":1.409336316211E9,"qty":1,"user_id":YOUR_USER_ID},"8182033":{"created_at":1.431448385824E9,"qty":2,"user_id":YOUR_USER_ID},"8583398":{"created_at":1.431448413452E9,"qty":3,"user_id":YOUR_USER_ID},"8585519":{"created_at":1.431448355207E9,"qty":3,"user_id":YOUR_USER_ID},"8601780":{"created_at":1.424915467829E9,"qty":3,"user_id":YOUR_USER_ID},"8602830":{"created_at":1.43144840911E9,"qty":1,"user_id":YOUR_USER_ID}},"users":{"-JXAzAp6rgtM4u2dV2tI":{"id":22232545,"name":"StevenH"},"-Jj2_kFsu5hvZRhx4KX1":{"id":YOUR_USER_ID,"name":"Steven H"},"-Jp8VvDusSDOyEiJ0J5D":{"id":YOUR_USER_ID,"name":"Steven H"}}}

Now empty your cart and we will make sure we can add all those things to your cart with a curl request. Take your response from earlier, and use it in the following line:

curl -X PATCH -d YOUR_FULL_CART_RESPONSE https://instacart.firebaseio.com/carts/YOUR_HASH_STRING.json

Now, your cart should be full of fruit again. Now we just need a way to recognize whether your fridge has fruit or not.

Detecting fruit in your fridge

For this we just need a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Project Board - 1GB RAM - 900 MHz Quad-Core CPU and a Raspberry PI 5MP Camera Board Module.
Set up your camera following these instructions and you will be ready to go. Set up your camera module in your fridge (or wherever you store your fruit).

We are going to use the Caffe framework for recognizing whether fruit is in the refrigerator drawer or not. You can read about how to do that here.
We are going to set this up similarly. Run the following commands to set things up:

git clone https://github.com/StevenHickson/AutonomousFridge.git
sudo apt-get install python python-pycurl python-lxml python-pip
sudo pip install grab sudo apt-get install apache2
mkdir -p /dev/shm/images
sudo ln -s /dev/shm/images /var/www/images

Then you must forward your router from port 5005 to port 80 on the Pi
Now you can edit test.sh with your info and run ./test.sh
Or add the following line to cron with crontab -e:
00 17 * * * /home/pi/AutonomousFridge/test.sh

This script takes a picture with raspistill and puts it in a symlinked directory in memory accessible from port 80. Then it sends that URL to the Caffe web demo and gets the result.
The Caffe demo shows how well it classifies the existence of fruit as shown below:

The end result of this is a script that runs every day at 5 pm. When your fridge doesnt have fruit, it adds a bunch of fruit to your Instacart cart. You can order it at your leisure to make sure you are home when it arrives. You could also use my PiAUISuite to get it to text you about your fruit status. It can be alot of fun to make a proof of concept of an old urban legend.

Consider donating to further my tinkering since I do all this and help people out for free.

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How to Sort Array in Java ascending and descending order of elements with Example

Quite often we need to sort array in Java luckily java.util.Arrays class provide several utility method to sort java array of any type e.g. primitive, object or int, String etc. Arrays is in java.util package and exposed all sorting related method as static utility functions. you can access sort() as Arrays.sort() and just pass your array and it will sort that array object. You can sort array in ascending order, descending order or any custom order defined by custom comparator in Java. In last article we have seen how to Sort ArrayList in Java and in this java article we will see examples of sorting array in ascending order, descending order and sorting sub arrays in java.

Sort Array in Java on ascending and descending order

Sorting Java Array into Ascending Order:

In order to sort an array (String, int or any type) in ascending order we dont need to to anything special. Arrays.sort() method by default sort elements in there natural order implemented by CompareTo method. String array in Java will be sorted lexicographically. integer will be sorted numerically ascending order. look on code section for complete example of how to sort java array into ascending order. You can also sort anonymous array in Java by this method but since you don’t have any name to refer that it doesn’t make much sense.

Sorting Java Array into Descending Order:

In order to sort a java array into descending order you need to provide an external Comparator in Java which can sort elements in there reverse order and luckily we have that built int as java.util.Collections.reverseOrder(), which returns a reverse order comparator which gives reverse of natural ordering of element objects. pass this reverse comparator to sort method and it will sort array into descending order as shown in code example on last section. There is another way in which you can convert Array into ArrayList and than sort the arraylist but that’s again a two step process so its better to sort array using Arrays.sort() method

Sorting Sub Array in Java

Arrays class also provide methods to sort part of java array or sub array. So in case if you have big array and you only need to sort a particular section than just provide start index and end index to java.util.Arrays.sort(array,index,index) and it will sort the array only for that range. this is much faster than sorting whole array and than getting a range of values out of it. here is code example of sorting part of array in Java:

Code Example of Sorting Array in Java

In this section of code example we will see how to sort Java array into ascending order, descending order and sorting sub arrays in Java:

import java.util.Arrays;

import java.util.Collections;

public class HashtableDemo {

public static void main(String args[]) {

String[] companies = { "Google", "Apple", "Sony" };

// sorting java array in ascending order

System.out.println("Sorting String Array in Ascending order in Java Example");

System.out.println("Unsorted String Array in Java: ");

printNumbers(companies);

Arrays.sort(companies);

System.out.println("Sorted String Array in ascending order : ");

printNumbers(companies);

// sorting java array in descending order

System.out.println("Sorting Array in Descending order in Java Example");

System.out.println("Unsorted int Array in Java: ");

printNumbers(companies);

Arrays.sort(companies, Collections.reverseOrder());

System.out.println("Sorted int Array in descending order : ");

printNumbers(companies);

System.out.println("Sorting part of array in java:");

int[] numbers = { 1, 3, 2, 5, 4 };

Arrays.sort(numbers, 0, 3);

System.out.println("Sorted sub array in Java: ");

for (int num : numbers) {

System.out.println(num);

}

}

public static void printNumbers(String[] companies) {

for (String company : companies) {

System.out.println(company);

}

}

}

Output:

Sorting String Array in Ascending order in Java Example

Unsorted String Array in Java:

Google

Apple

Sony

Sorted String Array in ascending order :

Apple

Google

Sony

Sorting Array in Descending order in Java Example

Unsorted int Array in Java:

Apple

Google

Sony

Sorted String Array in descending order :

Sony

Google

Apple

Sorting part of array in java:

Sorted sub array in Java:

1

2

3

5

4

Important points about Sort method of Arrays:

Here are some important and worth noting point about sort method of Arrays class for quick references:

1. Arrays.sort() is an overloaded method and can sort int, byte, short, char or object[] arrays.

2. Arrays.sort)( also allows you to sort a sub-array or part of array in Java.

3. Arrays class also contains utility methods e.g. binarySearch for performing search on array

That’s all on how to sort java array on ascending and descending order and part of array in Java. You can also use the workaround by converting array into arraylist and than sorting but I think Arrays.sort() is preferred method for sorting arrays in Java.

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