Faerity

Inspiration

Our inspiration for our web application came from the Minecraft mod, Verity. Verity is originally a helper friend for the player, who can answer any and al questions thrown at them. In the end, Verity turns evil and tries to turn on the player. We wanted to take that idea of a helper friend who knows everything, but instead of a horror take we wanted to make Verity more family friendly. Thus, the concept of Faerity came to be, a fairy helper friend who can answer any question about foraging and plant life thrown at it.

What it does

Our website connects to an online database that holds information on various plant life and their metrics, such as scientific name, family, edible portion, where it's found, and more. Assisted with our AI helper friend, Faerity, anyone can traverse the website to learn more about foraging and plant life while also asking Faerity for more customized help on any topic.

How we built it

The frontend of the web application was built using Next.js and tailwind.css for an intuitive and responsive UI. Tiger Data was used to connect the plant database into our web application to display all the information we have. Finally, we used a Gemini API to integrate a Gemini chatbot into our web application for users to ask questions.

Challenges we ran into

When trying to integrate Gemini into the web application, the team ran into problems with the initial implementation of the API key. Every time Gemini was ran in the terminal, no response was given back and a spew of errors would appear. There was also an issue with relaying the plant data from the database. While the web application sent a request towards the database, nothing would be sent back. We were fortunately able to work around this error.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The implementation of receiving information from the database then conveying it into the front end in a clean and intuitive UI is an accomplishment the team is proud of. Also, the implementation of the Gemini-powered AI helper and being able to send prompts and receive an answer back is also something the team prides themselves in.

What we learned

Out of the four members on the team, only one of them has attended a hackathon before. All other members have had no experience with hackathons before this, so the majority of the team learned what the hackathon environment is and how to work as a team using GitHub and VScode. The team also learnt the intricacies of back-end development, since no-one on the team was confident in their back-end skills. The team also learnt the important of having a friendly UI, encouraging users to explore and discover the various features on the web application.

What's next for Faerity

For future development of Faerity.garden, the team plans to add a few additional features that will inspire more user interaction. We initially planned to add recipes for food and drinks to the website but ultimately it was cut to save time, so that is a feature we are eager to add for future updates. Note that the recipes are for fun, and that all users should be careful and weary of the consumption of them. The team would also like to add a system where users can add their own custom plant data, in the case that the plant life they were looking for is not in the database.