A finally working and cheap fridge camera!

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An ESPHome configuration for an ESP32-CAM tailored for monitoring a refrigerator interior. Includes video streaming, a toggleable flashlight, and a reed-switch door sensor.

You can mount it inside or outside the fridge, but... Just do it how you want...

Hardware Setup

• Camera: AI Thinker ESP32-CAM module.
• Flashlight: Built-in high-power LED connected to GPIO4.
• Door Sensor: Simple 2-wire magnetic reed switch connected between GPIO13 and GND (no external resistors needed due to INPUT_PULLUP).

How to Use

1. Copy the contents of esphome-config.yaml into your ESPHome environment.
2. Edit the top substitutions: block to match your preferred names and area.
3. Ensure your local secrets.yaml contains the required keys: wifi_ssid, wifi_password, and fridgecam_api_key.
4. Flash the device.
5. Home Assistant AI Automation Setup

This blueprint takes a snapshot when the door opens, sends it to an AI vision model, and creates or updates one To-Do item per recognized food item: name plus separate quantity, condition, confidence and note fields, and an estimated bounding box (for fridge-card's detection-frame overlay). Items already in the list are matched by name, so an expiration/"best before" date you set by hand stays intact across scans. So does anything you edit on the card: quantity, condition, note, a Brand (which the AI never writes to at all) and a detection frame you drew by hand all stay exactly as you set them on the next scan instead of being overwritten by a fresh AI guess. Confidence is always the AI's latest estimate, since only the AI ever sets it. Items no longer detected are left alone - remove them yourself once you've used them up. An item marked eaten on the card is reactivated - not duplicated - if a later scan still recognizes it under the same name; it was evidently still there.

The AI is also told which item names were already used in a previous scan (with their last known box location) and asked to reuse an exact name when it's plausibly the same physical item — e.g. if you rename "Palacinka" to "Praženica" on the card, the next scan is nudged to say "Praženica" again instead of re-guessing. This is not real training — each analysis is a fresh, stateless request with no memory of past runs — it's just context added to that one prompt, so it's a best-effort nudge, not a guarantee; the AI can still occasionally invent a different name.

The AI Output Language blueprint input switches the item names/descriptions between English and Slovenčina; the structural markup (confidence scores, box coordinates) is unaffected.

Two delays are also configurable as blueprint inputs: Snapshot Delay (how long to wait after turning on the light before taking the photo, default 2.435s, to let the fridge interior get fully lit) and AI Analyze Delay (how long to wait after taking the photo before sending it to the AI, default 0s).

The Enable AI Detection toggle (on by default) lets you turn off the AI analysis and To-Do list update without disabling the automation itself: with it off, the door still triggers a snapshot and the light still cycles, but no AI request is made and the To-Do list is left untouched.

Prerequisites

1. AI Integration: You must have an extended AI conversation or task integration configured (like Google Generative AI or OpenAI Conversation) that provides the ai_task.generate_data action.
2. Folder Creation: Ensure the folder /config/www/fridge/ exists in your Home Assistant configuration directory to allow the camera snapshot to save correctly.
3. To-Do List: Create a dedicated To-Do list in Home Assistant named Fridge Contents (or similar).

Installation

Click the button below or copy your raw file link directly into the Settings > Automations & Scenes > Blueprints > Import Blueprint menu in Home Assistant.

Optional: saved snapshot history

fridge-card's Save and ◀ ▶ Latest controls let you keep a copy of the current photo and browse back through previously saved ones. This needs one shell_command added to your Home Assistant configuration.yaml - the card is just a browser page, so it has no way to copy a file on the HA server by itself:

shell_command:
  fridge_save_snapshot: >-
    sh -c 'ts=$(date +%s);
    mkdir -p /config/www/fridge/history;
    cp /config/www/fridge/fridge_latest.jpg /config/www/fridge/history/fridge_$ts.jpg;
    echo $ts >> /config/www/fridge/history/manifest.txt'

Restart Home Assistant (or reload YAML) after adding it, then set the card's snapshot_service option to shell_command.fridge_save_snapshot. Pressing Save copies whatever fridge_latest.jpg currently holds - not a fresh camera capture - into history/ under a timestamped filename, and appends that timestamp to history/manifest.txt; the card reads that plain text file directly to know what's browsable. Adjust the paths in the command if your image_path isn't the default /local/fridge/fridge_latest.jpg. This is entirely optional - without it, the card just shows the live photo as before.

Companion card

jan-tdy/fridge-card is the Lovelace UI half of this project: a custom card that shows the latest snapshot (with a config option to correct a crooked camera mount, an optional way to save and browse back through older snapshots - see above - and a refresh button to force-reload it) and the To-Do items this blueprint creates as a plain, editable list - name, quantity, condition, an AI confidence readout, note, brand, expiration date, each its own field, plus a checkbox to mark an item eaten (tucked into a collapsed "Eaten" section instead of deleted outright) - an optional overlay of the bounding boxes this blueprint estimates (editable/drawable by hand), plus quick controls for the light, door status, live camera view and re-running this automation. Point its todo_entity at the same To-Do list configured above.

If you found this useful, please star both repos!