CommonGround

Empowering Farmers. Protecting Communities. CommonGround makes field data visible and actionable. Now California sees risk before disaster hits.

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Lauren and I essentially asked ourselves the question: how can technology really make a difference? That curiosity brought CommonGround to life. We each bring unique perspectives. While we both study Computer Science, I’m specializing in Human-Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence with a Public Policy minor, while Lauren is focusing on Information Networks and Devices with a Global Engagement certificate. Despite our different concentrations, we pushed ourselves beyond our comfort zones and existing subject-matter expertise. I handled the hardware, while Lauren contributed AI insights using Claude. Together, we built a platform that bridges NGOs, governments, and farmers. The goal was essentially to do it all, tackle food insecurity, disaster relief, and inform government resource allocation.

We started with the goal of gathering local farm insights, so I retrieved hardware pieces from the rental facility. The ESP32’s Wi-Fi module allowed us to integrate real-time data with an Adafruit IO dashboard. But local data wasn’t enough. We also wanted regional insights to compare to the local farm sensors. For this, we accessed Open-Meteo for regional weather data, and Kaggle datasets for evaluating crop stress indices to make predictions on those local farm and regional conditions. During the hackathon we had the opportunity to speak to Postman and Claude and were inspired to implement their platform’s features as well for risk predictions.

The risk assessment would be impactful for all the potential customers but we also know a picture communicates a thousand words. To visualize the information, we created a heatmap of California. GEOJSON files for fire and earthquake risk were processed using Python scripts and displayed in Leaflet. Finally, we integrated Adafruit IO through API calls into our frontend to tie everything together.

Our top three lessons from CalHacks? Most importantly, regulating caffeine intake, planning before we build, and that patience is key—things rarely go perfectly the first time. It’s okay. Finding joy in the small victories and having a clear vision supersedes everything. Overall, CalHacks has been an incredible experience. From Wi-Fi challenges and Git errors, to testing the buzzer in a quiet cafe and taking stress walks, to late-night laughter, every moment was memorable.

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