Report that pantry

I led a team of about 10 students to build ReportThatPantry.org in collaboration with a local food bank that runs "little free pantries" - small wooden boxes where people leave food and others take. The motto is "take what you need, bring what you can." The volunteers who refill the boxes often found them empty - wondering how long they had been empty and if people in need had come to them in search of food only to find nothing.

Our initial solutions were all hardware focused: we tried to build a scale that could send weight data to the cloud, but quickly realized that canned food and cereal weighed very different amounts; we tried using Computer Vision but found it to be over-complicating and power hungry; and we even built a working physical button reporting system. A small box on the side of the pantry with 3 buttons - "Full," Half Full," and "Empty" powered by a Raspberry Pi that reported the user-input to our website. 

However, one day I was thinking about how we would scale and roll-out this solution, and realized there was a simpler way - what if we just created posters with QR codes that led to a reporting site. No need for batteries, weather-proof electronics, SIM cards, and complex maintenance. Convincing the team to drop the hardware was difficult (especially as an Electrical Engineer myself) however, the prospect of scaling the system to food pantries across our city within weeks - and across the country within months was exciting.

Today, the system is still being used by dozens of little free food pantries located across the United States, and the entire system is automated - including poster generation. I love hardware, but some things really are "just a software problem". To expand the project, we first rolled out the project with our partner TLC and worked out the kinks. As a team I led the creation of a national strategy, press release, branding, and Facebook page - within a few months we successfully scaled the project to include pantries in many states.