Automated Grocery Shopping

-

I want to share a project I worked on a while ago, that I still use from time to time. 

Basically all my grocery shopping is done at Kolonial.no, which is a Norwegian online grocery store that has an api for the shopping cart and products. 

I am a cheapskate in many fields, including grocery shopping. And how I shop is somewhat robotic, very predictable and some might say boring and uninspired. But the thought process when I select items, can easily be automated, so I did. The code is on my github. 

All the docs are there, so I won't bore you with that here. 

But the idea and process is quite simple:

  1. I need eggs. Eggs are not a product. Eggs are a category of products. So my shopping list in this code is the category ID of eggs at kolonial.no. 
  2. On the same line in my shopping list I can also specify words that should or should not appear in the product name. For example "frittgående" should be in the name. (Norwegian for "free range")
  3. Next filter is whether or not the product is in stock. It must be in stock.
  4. If this results in more than one product, sort the items by the gross unit price, and select the cheapest alternative. So the price per weight or volume matters.
  5. Finally, how many items of the product I want. Now I can put the product in correct quantity in my shopping cart.
So this is what happens in my head when I shop physically, but now also programmatically. It is a bit of initial work finding the correct ID's and building the shopping list (actually csv), but from there on out, it's snappy.

Here it is in action:




First is the list that says to buy 2 "eggs", and the word "frittgående" (case insensitive) must be in the name. So it found the cheapest product that fit the criteria, and put two of them in my shopping cart.
After the automation has done its thing, it's a good idea to look over what it did and do manual adjustments if the quantities or anything else is wrong.

You may find it odd that I do this with docker. It might be overcomplicating things, but I prefer to dockerize as much as possible. A bit irrational perhaps, but it works on any computer with docker and I like it.

So I hope this post and code helps and inspires some of you to automate your own shopping or other mundane tasks in your life.

Have a great day! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hidden settings in the Raspberry Pi Imager

-
Image
 So I've written a few micro sd cards over the years for my various Raspberry Pi projects. I always found it a pain to every time enable SSH and Wifi before boot by placing the ssh file and wifi profile on their respective places on the sd card before the first boot. Doing it manually with keyboard and display is even worse. I recently found out about the hidden options of the Raspberry Pi imager , and want to relay this information to my readers.  So when you open the imager, it might look like this: Now, press Ctrl+Shift+X Tadaa! MUCH better, I now look forward to flashing for my next project!
Read more

Getting the Miyoo Mini Plus battery into Home Assistant

-
Image
I recently got the retro handheld  Miyoo Mini Plus , love it so far! I also installed Onion OS on it, never even tried the stock experience.  Your setup, especially in Home Assistant might differ, so try to adapt this guide to your needs. But enough intro, you're likely reading this because you want the battery percentage into Home Assistant or some other system. This isn't a food blog where you need to scroll a mile to get to the recipe. What you will need: A Miyoo Mini Plus Onion OS 4.2 (or newer as far as I know. I run 4.2.3 at the time of writing) Home Assistant with the Syncthing Add-On configured Or some other way of getting synced files read by Home Assistant MicroSD card reader and a computer, of course Some knowledge in Syncthing and Home Assistant What you need to do: Install Syncthing on the SD card and start it . Make sure it works. With the card inn your computer, create a folder on the root of the card, named syncthing Open the hidden folder named .tmp_update, a...
Read more

Getting Company Portal apps locally using PowerShell (no auth!)

-
Image
As you may know, I work at Intility in the application packaging space.  I've been doing that since about 2015, and during that time I and my collegaues have developed standards and systems to help us package apps better and faster. The so far last and unifying system is AppPackBot, which you can read more about at Intility Engineering . I won't (and quite frankly can't) go into all the nuts and bolts beyond what that blog post says, but I wanted to share something. You see, there are mainly two "app stores" in a corporate Windows environment. Good old Software Center, and the new Company Portal. Software Center can be programmatically interacted with using the CCM_Application WMI Class . But Company Portal, not so much.  I burst out laughing when I read this attempt to install an app from Company Portal using PowerShell. Tldr: Using the companyportal: protocol to open Company Portal with a given app guid, and then sending a ctrl+i keystroke that equals clicking ...
Read more