Bring! Shopping List Updater

When you go shopping, you may use a list scrawled on a piece of paper, notes on your phone, or perhaps even a specialized app like Bring! to help you remember what you need to get at the store. If you do use such an app, and would like to add items by simply pointing at them, this barcode scanner setup by David Escudero lets you do just that.

The device is built on an M5StickC ESP32-PICO development kit, which communicates with a barcode reader over serial. You simply point it at an item’s barcode label, press the button, and voila, it's on the list. The M5StickC provides a trigger button, as well as a screen for feedback, and it’s housed in a 3D-printed enclosure along with the scanner.

Behind the scenes, barcodes are being sent to a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant over MQTT. Once a barcode is received, a Python program looks for the barcode in an Excel product list, identifies the product, and sends it to the Bring! application via an unofficial API. The system then sends feedback to the reader to show the name of the product, confirming yes, it is “Cola,” or whatever else you happened to have scanned. It’s a neat application, integrating several interesting pieces of hardware and software.