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Comment by rconti | Hacker News Reader

If you can crack the market of auto-restocking a large variety of household goods, I think you're on to something, hopefully just using coffee as a starting point.

I HATE managing 'subscription' services; it's more work than just reordering manually, (looking at you, Soylent and Amazon) and Amazon Dash buttons didn't help because the item you paired it to is never still around when you press the button.

I wouldn't want to deal with all of this overhead for just restocking one supply (coffee) but I certainly see the value if many products were covered.

Best of luck!

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In a different life, I was working on a device that could turn any fridge into a smart fridge. Using computer vision to auto restock food when you ran low. The prototype felt pretty magical for the few food items it could recognize.

Maybe some day later down the line :)

Sounds cool! We've thought about this concept a lot. We always assumed that the fridge would be too messy for this to actually work. I'd be interested in hearing about your approach.

It's so simple it's kind of stupid. Don't have the camera face the inside of the fridge, point it out and watch the I/O instead.

My email is in my bio, happy to show you what was initially built out and lessons learned! Could be useful for you.

Exactly! Coffee : Bottomless :: Books : Amazon

Interesting you mentioned Soylent. Part of the motivation for Bottomless was our Soylent subscription. We have enough piled up to survive Armageddon.

I'm curious about your comment on the overhead. The scale takes 60 seconds to set up, and lasts for over a year on a charge. I definitely understand that any set-up sometimes feels like too much!

So you'd end up with loads of scales all over the kitchen?

I don't understand how this sort of thing would work with many food types. Looking at the product as is, I already don't want a random scale laying around. Never mind 10 scales for 10 different products. Then if you forget to put something on a scale, the product isn't ordered. It all seems quite annoying and chaotic. Also the scale is large and ugly, and something I don't want to maintain. I.e. what if it loses battery or wifi etc. Then imagine multiple of these scales lying around. I like my kitchen looking super clean and tidy and the idea of tons of these scales around the place immediately turns me off the idea.

I wish I could upvote you 100 times! The idea that this could scale out to a bunch of different household products seems absolutely insane. I can only think of a handful of items that we keep “in stock” in our kitchen and only a fraction of those that have a distinct placement in my kitchen. It just seems like so much hassle to knoll all my food items to make sure they are tracked correctly. I can’t even begin to imagine my wife going along with this and we have a young child who is just discovering how to get things from cabinets and the fridge so this is just a nonstarter. It feels like I would spend a good amount of my time just making sure every food item was exactly in the right spot.

How about if the item’s regular spot in the cupboard or fridge has neat scale like a little placemat? I put my coffee in the same spot every day. Same with the milk, eggs, cheese, bread, apples, etc.

Even better if the cupboard liner is one big but slim scale and can figure out the weight of each item. Not too hard if you take things out one at a time.

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