EcoSentry

Inspiration

When homecooks like me cook in the kitchen, we often like using fresh herbs like basil in our food. However, whenever I buy fresh basil from the grocery store, it never lasts longer than a week.

What it does

We came up with the idea of building a greenhouse like enclosure that helps users grow fresh basil with most amount of support using the least amount of effort. It uses a humidity sensor, temperature sensor, moisture sensor, and a water level sensor. First, the three initial sensors work together to give the user a read of the situation displayed an OLED screen. It works in conjunction with a water pump that dispenses water when the soil moisture is lower than a certain threshold. We also attempted to incorporate a plant grower light to the apparatus.

How we built it

After designing the model and fleshing out what features we wanted it to have, we split into two teams: the chassis team and the electrical team. From there, the electrical team worked on trouble shooting and getting all the sensors to work. After the chassis team finished, we pivoted into training the AI model and assisting with any extra help the electrical team needed.

Challenges we ran into

Our original goal was to train an AI to recognize and diagnose the condition of the plant by observing the leaf quality using a connected camera. While we were able to train it using pre trained data sets, we were only able to get the AI to recognize larger plants and not juvenile plants.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to get all four sensors to work successfully AND also display on the OLED screen. The chassis is also decently built given our time frame. We are also proud of the AI model we were able to train since it was the first time for all of us. Lastly, we are simply proud of the idea itself as well as being able to complete our first Hackathon!

What we learned

Keeping expectations realistic and being able to figure out a clear path to our goal were the two most important lessons. It's easy to dream and be ambitious but being able to back it up in a short span of time is where the difficulty arises. We had to cutback on some of the features but due to our ability to pivot, we were still able to deliver a functional product.