5 Useful Raspberry Pi Projects For Your Kitchen
Raspberry Pis are excellent tools to bring your home to the modern age without spending thousands of dollars on fancy smart devices and electronic gadgets. These single-board computers are incredibly versatile in that they can be used in a host of home projects. You can find useful Pi projects for your bedroom, such as alarm clocks and smart displays.
There are plenty of places they can be used in the rest of your living space, too, such as home assistants, security cameras, and even digital photo frames. While you might not think of adding a DIY electronic project to your kitchen, Raspberry Pis offers several applications in that regard, too. These boards can make meal prep, cooking, and even pantry management less tedious.
If you want to add a touch of modernity to your cooking space, check out these five DIY Raspberry Pi projects you can easily build. And yes, they're great hands-on projects for practicing your electronic and programming skills, too.
Kitchen TV
A Raspberry Pi smart kitchen display is a great entertainment hub for your cooking space, but there's just something more appealing about watching the news or browsing the web on a bigger screen. In that case, this kitchen TV project might be a better alternative.
In this setup, a Raspberry Pi is connected to a wall-mounted TV and runs a web-based app. The app essentially divides the entire screen into several handy sections:
- An analog clock: Positioned on the right side. Its design is customizable to fit your aesthetic.
- News headlines: Found below the analog clock. The content displayed here is sourced from the latest headlines on the BBC news website.
- A date and digital time: Displayed on the left side and overlays on the video player.
- Video player: Streams news/music content from a preset list of YouTube LIVE channels that can be customized. Each of the channels only plays for a specific period before automatically switching to a different one. However, there's also a channel selector and simple volume level control should you choose a channel to watch or listen to manually.
- Web browser: A dedicated button located in the channel selector. This opens up a DuckDuckGo search bar if you need to look up some recipes.
- Weather display: Powered by Yahoo! Weather API, tells you today's temperature, humidity, and wind speed and provides a forecast for the next few days.
The TV can be controlled using its remote control companion or a keyboard and mouse combo connected to the Raspberry Pi. To build the project, you'll only need a Raspberry Pi and any old TV for the hardware and some basic PHP and Javascript knowledge for the software, so you can readily customize the display to fit your needs.
Flame detector
The American Red Cross names kitchens as one of the most likely places for house fires to start. After all, it's where you can find cooking equipment and a host of electrical appliances. If you're looking to supplement your existing fire detection system for peace of mind, a Raspberry Pi-powered flame detector is an excellent addition to your space.
This fire alert system uses a flame sensor to detect fire. As soon as it senses the presence of a flame, it transmits a signal to the Pi board, which, in turn, sends a message to the registered WhatsApp number. This contains a link to the Google Maps location of the Pi. The system is also designed to notify the WhatsApp number every time it's booted up. For the hardware components, the project only calls for a smartphone with WhatsApp installed, a flame sensor, and the Raspberry Pi (and a LAN or Wi-Fi dongle if you're using a model with no Wi-Fi support). On the software side, the system is developed using Python and uses a Twilio library to send the message. When installing the system in your kitchen, make sure it isn't positioned too close to the gas stoves where open flames are normal and can be easily detected.
More than keeping your home safe, this flame detector project is also a great starting point if you're a beginner in coding and electronics. The code isn't as complex as you might initially think. It's a simple 37-line code that uses pretty basic Python statements and functions.
Grocery list maker
It's an all-too-familiar scene: you're whipping up a grilled chicken for dinner when you realize you're out of olive oil again. Coincidentally, this happens only a day after you've made your regular grocery store trip. Now, you have to head back just for that one thing you forgot to write on your shopping list. To avoid this kind of inconvenience in the future, you need a grocery list maker in your kitchen.
This DIY project does this by adding grocery items to a Trello shopping list that you can easily access on demand. Whenever you run out of an ingredient, simply scan the item's barcode with the scanner connected to the Raspberry Pi. The Pi will then look up the barcode on a custom-made database (that you can modify to include your own items). If it's in the database, the product's name is directly added to the list. If it's a new item, its barcode will be added as a placeholder instead. You can edit the entry on Trello to inform the system what the product is. Doing so will also automatically update the database to recognize the item in future scans.
The entire system runs on a web server developed with Flask and CSS. It's displayed on Google Chrome, which automatically starts upon bootup. Aside from the shopping list, which you'll see is updated in real-time, the web server also displays the date and time, today's weather, the next three days' forecast, your Google Calendar complete with events, and a Trello to-do list.
Pantry monitoring system
So you can scan grocery items to add them to your shopping list, but what about other food items without barcodes — like fresh produce from the farmer's market or unpackaged poultry from the butcher shop? Normally, you'd have to manually check each product to know which ones you'd have to buy on your grocery run, but you're always bound to forget to do so, especially on busy days. Fortunately, there's a Raspberry Pi project that can help you manage your pantry more efficiently.
This smart pantry keeps an eye on your barcode-less items for you. It features a container outfitted with a force-sensitive resistor, whose output changes depending on how heavy the item pressed on it is. This way, you can estimate (in grams) how much product you have left. This data is then uploaded to the ARTIK Cloud server and subsequently displayed on a custom Android app, where you'll see photos of your food items and their current weight.
Other than the Raspberry Pi, the project also uses an Arduino microcontroller where the force-sensitive resistor is connected. If you're using an Arduino UNO (which has six analog inputs), you can connect up to six resistors to the board, meaning you only need to build one system to monitor six items. You can also add a temperature and humidity sensor to the Arduino to check your pantry's environmental conditions. Software-wise, you'd be working with the WebSocket module on the Raspberry Pi and the ARTIK Cloud platform. If you're interested in modifying the custom mobile app, you also need to be comfortable with the Android Studio Environment as well.
Fridge/freezer temperature monitor
If there's one thing that's certain about electronic and electrical devices, it's that they're bound to malfunction at some point. But while glitches in your phone and TV are usually tolerable, you can't say the same for your fridge or freezer. You need it to be functional 24/7/365, or else you'll end up with a significant amount of food waste. To save you from disaster, consider building this smart fridge/freezer thermometer for your kitchen.
This project helps keep your meat, produce, and other perishables frozen and fresh for longer. It monitors the interior environmental condition of your cooling appliances with the help of a simple temperature and humidity sensor that sits inside the freezer/fridge. The sensor takes temperature and humidity readings every ten minutes and sends them to the Raspberry Pi Zero W positioned outside the appliance. This data is then uploaded to a web-based visualization platform (Initial State), where you can view your appliance's status on demand.
Beyond displaying data, the platform used is also responsible for keeping an eye on the temperature. When it receives a temperature higher than the threshold set (indicating a malfunction or power outage), it automatically notifies you via text or email. The platform also monitors the sensor itself. Every 15 minutes, it checks the amount of data it receives from the sensor. If it's below expectations, it sends you a text or email that the system may be down or experiencing issues.