COVID Making: From Cyber Pantries to Cyber Glasses

Matt Desmarais, who goes by Matt the Maker, describes the community food pantry he has volunteered with since 2007. The pantry ran on paper order forms, an old Access database and aging desktops, and it repeatedly lost food when freezers failed without anyone noticing. He begins with the pantry's distribution models, then explains how he tackled the freezer problem with low-cost sensors that log temperatures to a cloud dashboard and send text alerts when a door stays open or a unit warms past a threshold.

The middle of the talk covers the alarm logic he tuned by testing it on a deliberately unplugged freezer, the motion sensors that stopped false alarms during deliveries, and the separate rules he used for refrigerators. He then moved intake to Salesforce, Google Workspace, Formstack and Zapier during the drive-through period of the pandemic, and built a now-serving display and a packing-station feed. According to the order data he presents, letting clients choose their own items cut inventory use substantially.

The closing section turns to a wearable Raspberry Pi display he built in 2017 and rebuilt in 2021 with a camera, bone conduction audio and a gamepad-driven application launcher. His takeaway is that people with technical skills can improve local services, and that open-source hardware makes such projects affordable, while organizations still need simple, packaged solutions they can run themselves.