Garden Guardian

How many plants have you killed? Did you feel guilty? Was it shocking? You likely watered it every day, put it underneath the sun, and it still failed to grow. The solution is our Garden Guardian.

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Inspiration

Our team was inspired to put all our skills together in one project. Through the inclusion of web development, AI integration, and hardware expertise, we managed to make something that took a little from everyone's skill set.

What it does

Our Garden Guardian system keeps track of individual house plants and their environment. We aimed to gamify the whole plant-raising experience by providing feedback on a user's performance. Through metrics such as humidity, air quality, daily average sunlight, and more, we allow Gemini to analyze one's progress and offer suggestions. This allows for tailored suggestions to each species of plant.

How we built it

We started by first conceptualizing the most obvious use case. A user would want a convenient way to set up the device to record the environmental factors throughout large timeframes, so we aimed to keep the process simple.

  • Khurram worked on the device itself, combining four different sensors into one ESP-32.
  • Blake developed the backend responsible for receiving the raw data and having Gemini interpret the result
  • Jonathan designed the gamified frontend used to display the results in a simple, engaging way through the React framework It took a combination of all our experiences and fresh perspectives to develop the Garden Guardian System.

Challenges we ran into

There were obviously many challenges when developing this project, but some were more surprising than others:

  • Everyone's credit cards kept getting declined when trying to redeem the free credits offered by sponsors
  • The first set of hardware we borrowed from MLH didn't work
  • Our AWS database had to be scrapped as it was found unsuitable
  • The school's wifi kept turning off intermittently
  • The file used for 3D printing didn't save after making an addition, so the print wasn't to scale. ## Accomplishments that we're proud of Given that two of our members participated in a Hackathon for the first time, we are proud of how much we accomplished.
  • We were able to build the entire monitoring system in a day, considering how hard it is to troubleshoot, test, calibrate, and find documentation for it
  • We created our own art to be used for this project of which we didn't have experience doing
  • We were able to figure out how to send data from our device to a database and then access it
  • Despite being faced with many challenges, even before starting the competition, we decided to keep going and give it our 100% ## What we learned
  • Always double-check your files before sending them to 3D print.
  • Creativity motivates more than words.
  • Failure teaches more than success

What's next for Garden Guardian

  • We hope to add more features to the website, such as more sprites, fix some design choices we made with better alternatives, and improve the overall experience that much more.
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