Ag Automation

Inspiration

Ag Automation is a response to a fundamental issue in food production today. By the year 2050 there will be 9.1 billion mouths to feed and our current food production system has no way to handle this shift. Ag Automation wants to be the solution to this problem by offering a full solution in the form of a fully autonomous indoor farm that uses machine learning algorithms to optimize growth cycles and maximize food output per unit area of land. This will provide a large multiplier on the land utilization of current methods. This all starts with an app that can manage this complex system.

What it does

What we are presenting today is the front end of our platform on the mobile phone. It is a monitoring and management system for the farm. The automation allows the system to operate quite freely, so the interference from the customer should be quite minimal. This means that the app is mostly for monitoring. In the future it should be able to authenticate user profiles with a central server and communicate with the indoor farm in order to obtain real-time data.

How I built it

We developed an android app on android studio using Java. None of us had worked with Android Studio before 1pm yesterday and we were able to develop a great front end. The system is mainly for information delivery, so the application has limited communication with the back end.

Challenges I ran into

The interface for logging into an account stored on Firebase and retrieving user data stored on the back end proved to be very difficult.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Each step of the process was somewhat of a challenge simply because the topic was brand new to everyone on the team, but I am very proud of the progress that we were able to make in this short amount of time. The user interface was a very important topic for us and we spent a lot of time making sure it would be functional and simple for the user.

What I learned

I learned a tremendous amount about app development, Android Studio, and Java. I looked up many things on YouTube, stackoverflow, and other references online and was able to make a great deal of progress using what I knew about programming before the hackathon.

What's next for Ag Automation

We are in the midst of prototyping software and hardware. We have a deadline of a minimum viable product for both by the end of the summer (August). We have an interview with the Alchemist Accelerator on Saturday, Feb. 3 that we are very hopeful about. We are applying to several different programs in an effort to obtain funding for bringing our solution to life.

Built With

• c/c++
• java