Development of E-Genius Shopping Cart Billing Estimator Using Arduino Microcontroller

Abstract

People nowadays are fond of buying goods, most of the time they buy "one-time big-time" as old sayings to save time and money. Carts were helpful, especially when customers are up to a large number of goods to have. It provides the customer ease to carry their purchased goods from the store to their respective cars. Due to long queues, overspending, and troublesome price inquiry in the supermarkets, the researchers have been challenged to innovate a more conventional shopping cart through Shopping Cart Automation (SCAn). The main objective of this project was to design an automated shopping cart that enhances the conventional shopping cart that was capable of setting the budget, price inquiry, over the budget notification, and alarm for users to monitor the accumulated price of all items in the shopping cart. In this project, only those scanned items will be included as purchased items. The researchers have inserted a secure digital (SD) card connected to the Arduino microcontroller as a storage device for the price database; the price database comprises all of the items stored on the SD card; thus, adding any item scanned will result in a purchase. It was additionally found that notifying clients by way of monitor displays alone is insufficient; hence, a beeping alarm was used to alert customers when the customer's total price for products in the cart exceeds the pre-defined budget.  The SCAn has a high demand in supermarkets, especially in the local area, based on the interviews with the target beneficiary and other small-scale grocery conducted by the researchers. Implementing this project would cut costs, save time, improve efficiency, eliminate human error, and later be developed long into the future, such as more protected casing, voice services for notification, and installing the thermal printer.