Hello, my name is Josiah. I am working on a project to help better the company I am working at. I specifically work with inventory with large and small amounts of items.
I want to program an OLED display with an Arduino UNO; to show the item name and the quantity.
I also want to program several buttons to add and subtract the quantity by 1, 20, and 100 increments.
My goal is to have an OLED at each station where an item is stored, and someone can adjust the quantity when they are taking or adding to the quantity.
I would love help on the best ways to program or setup the Arduino or even any advice on a simpler way of adjusting the quantity (maybe a custom button to insert a custom amount).
Will they be connected by Wifi and talk to a central database? Does the central server exist? What is the budget for the project, what is anticipated timeline? If it takes twice as long which is fairly normal, what impact will that have?
Thanks for the reply. I am wanting to put an Arduino at each station that has a OLED screen. I would just create the housing for whatever is needed as a whole.
Based on the current inventory storage units, I'm thinking its going to be a massive amount of Arduinos, in the thousands. However, its an open timeline.
Please, no. For decades I have been wasting hundreds of work hours correcting front-of-the-house inventory "solutions" that cost thousands, but are constantly off. I am called to resort to pen and paper to make these costly time-wasters accurate before going back online. Try a free smart-phone app with live sync and offline storage (for when tech dies... and it will at the worst time)... before you make your own.
Have you considered the cost of doing this the way that you describe ?
Consider alternatives such as a portable device with a screen that could be used to do what you want. You could use a barcode or RFID tags at each "station" to identify the item being dealt with
Data would be held centrally as suggested by @sonofcy
The Arduino will act as a stationary monitor that will be placed in front of the storage unit. We have cycle counters for checking inventory quantities each week so we will not be using a "central database" or "central server."
Its an open budget. However, depending on optimization, the plan is to save on cost as much as possible.
The timeline is open ended as well. This is a project I want to do for the company and has no strict timeline.
This project will image the labor of both cycle counting and inventory analyzing.
I will consider that. However, my goal is to have a solution to the current problem, which is count variants. Even after a second count on items in the storage, there are still miscounts and a large use of time. I am trying to minimize both. Again, I will consider maybe an alterative resource if Arduino would not be the most ideal solution towards this problem.
I created several inventory systems in my career including one award-winning system. There will always be slight discrepancies due to human nature. Consider rolling inventories, more frequent inventories for high unit price items, and most used items. Good luck, you have received a lot of good information quickly from people who have done this but you seem to not want to listen so I will mute.
No way that an arduino solution involving hundreds or thousands of devices will remotely come close to being less cost effective than a basic PC and a handful of Android tablets.
And that's before considering replacement, upgrade, and other maintenance issues. This is a well solved problem, your solution is not an improvement.