Someone built a Raspberry Pi-powered smart fridge gadget that tells you when you're running low on beer

Published Jul 24, 2026, 10:23 AM EDT Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto. Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more. Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. Sign in to your XDA account Summary This Raspberry Pi-powered smart fridge project tracks drink counts, syncs with Home Assistant, and auto-updates a shopping list. A barcode camera logs removals and adds products via scan; runs locally, no cloud required. The entire project is overengineering at its finest, but it's also undeniably cool. Sometimes I come across a DIY project that's so ingenious I'm surprised I haven't heard of someone doing it sooner. In a recent Reddit post on r/homeassistant, DeutschundAnonym (DerRobin99 on GitHub) outlined their very over-the-top Raspberry Pi-powered Smart Drink Fridge project. Basically, the project keeps track of how many drinks are currently in the fridge, and for each product, DeutschundAnonym sets a minimum stock level and a target stock level. The setup even features Home Assistant integration and automatically synchronizes with a shopping list within the following parameters: Stock falls to or below the minimum > the required quantity is automatically added to the HA shopping list Stock changes > the quantity on the shopping list is automatically updated You restock the fridge > the shopping list entry is automatically removed once it is no longer needed Synchronization tracking prevents duplicate entries In the post, DeutschundAnonym explains that they always want to have 20 bottles of a certain beer in their fridge, with the minimum stock never dropping below five. Once his system reaches five bottles, Home Assistant automatically adds 15 more beers to the list, and then after the fridge has been restocked, the entry disappears. Detailed steps to build your own smart drink fridge are on GitHub Never run out of beer again Credit: DerRobin99 / GitHub New products can also be added to a web interface DeutschundAnonym created by scanning each item's barcode. And of course, when you actually remove a drink from the fridge, you need to make sure you hold the barcode in front of the camera for it to be detected and automatically updated with a transaction timestamp. The entire thing is basically overengineered nonsense at its absolute finest. On a hardware level, the project is powered by a Raspberry Pi and a barcode scanner built with a 1080p USB camera (an optional buzzer can also be added to the setup to provide feedback on a successful or failed barcode scan). Best of all, it all runs locally, and no cloud service is required, so all of your data stays on your own device. As is often the case with projects like this, DeutschundAnonym wants to share the glory of his beer-filled fridge gadget and has outlined everything in detail on GitHub.