Plug-in accessories (STEMMA QT / Qwiic)¶
Some things belong under your fingers, not behind a menu. Pantry Raider supports a family of small boards that plug straight into a Pi appliance with a single cable: no soldering, no breadboard, no firmware to flash. Plug one in, add it in Settings, and it works.
The first of them is the one you will notice most: a four-key pad that sits on the counter and decides what your barcode scanner does.
The four keys and the scanner¶
The barcode scanner already knows four different jobs. Scan a box of pasta and Pantry Raider needs to know whether you just bought it, are about to cook it, want more of it, or are counting what is on the shelf. That choice is the scanner mode, and until now you changed it on a screen.
With a NeoKey 1x4 on the counter, each key is one of those jobs:
| Key | Mode | What a scan does |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Stock | Adds what you scan to the pantry |
| 2 | Use | Takes what you scan back out |
| 3 | Shop | Puts what you scan on the shopping list |
| 4 | Audit | Counts what you scan, changing nothing |
Tap a key and the mode changes instantly, everywhere: the kiosk, the Stream Deck, and any other screen catch up on their own. On a device with a kitchen display, the press also brings the screen straight to the Manage page, so one tap sets the mode and puts the scan page in front of you. Change the mode somewhere else and the pad follows within a moment, so the counter never lies about what the scanner is about to do.
The pad rests in a single calm color, Pantry Raider pink out of the box, with the current mode's key a little brighter than the rest. At the Manage screen, where the on-screen mode tiles carry their own colors, the keys take on those same mode colors (green, amber, blue, purple), so you can match each key to the tile it drives. Four colors glowing on the counter all day would be noise; one color that says the pad is awake, and mode colors that arrive exactly when they mean something, is not. The resting color is yours to change with the Key color picker in the Accessories section.
The moment your hands are full of groceries, this is the difference between putting the bag down to tap a screen and just hitting a key with a knuckle.
What you need¶
- A Pi appliance (Pantry Raider on a Pi, hosted or as a remote Bandit). These boards plug into the device itself, so a Docker server in a closet has nothing to plug them into.
- An Adafruit NeoKey 1x4 and one STEMMA QT cable.
STEMMA QT (Adafruit) and Qwiic (SparkFun) are the same connector with two names, so boards from either brand work on the same cable. The boards also chain: one cable from the Pi to the first board, another from that board to the next.
See the hardware guide for which port to use and how to wire it, including the adapter cable option if your board has header pins instead of a QT socket.
Setting one up¶
- Plug it in with the Pi powered off, then boot it. Nothing else is wired; the keys are read over the same cable that powers them.
- Open Settings, Thermometers & Sensors, Accessories. Within a minute the NeoKey appears under "Found plugged in". Press Add.
- That is the whole setup. The keys arrive mapped in the order above, so the pad works the moment you add it.
- Optionally give it a name ("Counter keys"), remap any key, or turn the brightness down for a kitchen you walk through at night.
If the section says this device cannot use accessories, it will say why:
usually the I2C connection is not turned on yet, which one run of
sudo foodassistant-gadgets-setup on the device fixes, followed by a reboot.
What a key can do¶
Each key gets a dropdown, grouped by the kind of job:
- Scanner modes. Any of the four scan jobs above. Two keys can share a mode if that suits how you work.
- Open a page. The press sends the kitchen display straight to a main page: Glance, Inventory, Expiring, Manage, Review, Cook, Recipes, Meal Plan, Shopping, Kitchen Guide, Timers, Weather, or Cameras. A press on a Bandit's pad drives that device's own screen.
- Timers. One-shot timer actions, each safe to hit blind: start a quick 5 minute countdown, add 5 minutes to whichever timer finishes next, or dismiss a finished timer mid-flash.
- Nothing. Leaves the key dark and inert; a press is simply ignored.
Keys set to a page or a timer action glow a quiet white so you can find them in the dark; keys set to scanner modes wear the colors described above and behave exactly as they always have.
Not sure which physical key a row means? Press Test next to it and that key lights up white for a moment.
The scanner-mode colors are fixed, one per mode, so the same color always means the same thing on every surface that shows it. The pad's other two colors are yours: the Key color picker sets what the keys rest in between jobs, and the Timer color picker sets the countdown bar and its finished-timer flash. And if the tinkering goes somewhere you regret, the Reset keys to defaults button puts everything back the way it came: every key on its original job, brightness back to normal, and the pink key color and red timer color restored. It asks before it changes anything, and your accessories stay added; only their settings change.
A running timer on the keys¶
While a timer counts down, the four keys become one bar that empties the way a glass does, from the top down, with the key at the head of the bar breathing gently. Across the kitchen, with your hands in a bowl, a glance at the counter tells you roughly how long is left without finding a screen or waking one. When time is up the whole pad flashes until you deal with it (a key mapped to the dismiss timer action silences it right from the pad). The bar follows whichever timer finishes soonest, wears the timer color (red out of the box), and goes back to showing the scanning modes when nothing is running.
On a Bandit remote¶
A NeoKey plugged into a Bandit (a remote Pi that shows your main server's kitchen) selects the mode for the whole house, not just that Bandit. The key press travels to the main server, which is where your inventory lives, and every screen everywhere follows. Put a pad on the kitchen counter and another by the garage freezer if you like; each one drives the same scanner mode, and both stay lit on whichever mode is current.
When something is unplugged¶
Pull the cable and the accessory's card says so within a minute or two, the same way a silent sensor does. Plug it back in and it recovers on its own; nothing needs restarting, and its key mapping is remembered by where it sits on the connector, not by luck.
More to come¶
The connector is one cable standard with hundreds of boards behind it, and the plumbing here is built for all of them. Coming next: distance and motion sensors that wake the screen when you walk up, temperature and humidity sensors that join your fridge and room sensors with no batteries to change, a rotary knob for adding time to a running timer, and a status light that goes red when an alarm fires.
Everything here is off until you plug something in and add it, and nothing touches your existing setup.