SmartFridge - Office Fridge Web App

Lots of companies have fridges with special drinks at low costs for employees which are maintained by volunteers. Operating those fridges is time consuming and often results in large bags of coins.

SmartFridge is a laster-pay web app that makes operations easier. Purchases are stored in a database, user can review their purchases and make payments (eg. with PayPal) whenever they want in their profiles. This provides a constant cash flow for continuously buying new drinks. There is also an email system attached, reminding users of payments. No more tally charts, no more coin boxes! Digitalize your frigde!

How to make purchases? The app provides a public REST endpoint which can be triggered with a user ID. At the moment every purchase is € 1,00. Here are some ideas on how to call the API:

• A Raspberry Pi attached to the fridge with an RFID reader that reads the customer's ID and call the endpoint. (That is what I do - see my smart-fridge sensor project).
• The same but with NFC and the customer's phone instead of an RFID card.
• The same but with a fingerprint reader.
• An app on the customer's phone with a button that triggers an endpoint call.
• Something even nerdier?

The web app provides a user side (user purchase and payment history) and an admin side (confirmation of payments, user CRUD, dashboard). Users have a unique secret link instead of a username/password login.

This web app works fine with Heroku, Heroku Postgres and Sendgrid.

User Registration and Profile

Admin Area with Payment and Account Management

Config

1. Create a config/adminList.js from the template. Those are the admin accounts.
2. Create a config/databaseConnection.js from the template. It has to be Postgres.
3. Create a config/mailProvider.js from the template. Sendgrid works fine.
4. Edit the services/mailService.js if you want to use different email contents.
5. Setup your payment information by creating frontend/scripts/config/paymentMethods.tpl.html from the template.
6. Setup your frontend translation by creating frontend/scripts/config/i18n.js from the template.

Setup

Backend

1. run npm install
2. Provision the database by running npm run provision

Frontend

1. run npm install in frontend
2. run grunt build in frontend to build the frontend

Run locally

1. start the backend with npm run start
2. start the frontend with npm run start in frontend

Deploy

1. run grunt build in frontend to build the frontend
2. run npm run start (or simply push to Heroku)