Green Fields

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Inspiration

Due to the alarming mental health crisis due to Covid-19 and quarantine restrictions that has affected the American population, we were determined to find a solution. In a study done by John Hopkins University and the CDC, the U.S. catapulted the annual percent from 26% (1 in 4) of adults to 40% in 2020.

What it does

It can monitor your plant from the temperature to ensuring it’s getting enough heat and light, to the moisture levels of the soil so you can water it when needed, and the best part? It’s all done remotely. This smart flower pot has the expansive and innovative capabilities to track your plant’s health and provide it with the necessary care it needs while you are away so you don’t miss a day when you are taking care of your loved ones, and when you are focusing on your mental health.

How we built it

Projects Green Fields is a hardware hack that integrates a smart flower pot that uses a raspberry pi hooked up to temperature, photoresistors, and moisture sensors to post data to a flask restful api backend. We then process this data collected from the sensors using a trained machine learning model created in TensorFlow to generate a score that rewards users based on actions the level of care the user puts into the plant such as watering the plant or adjusting the lighting. The Flask backend sends this score along with data highlights to the React.js front end built with Material UI to give users responsive and satisfying cues/feedback in the user interface.

Challenges we ran into

When we got into crafting our idea and finally settling on a concept we were proud of going forth with, applying to it the hardware aspect is what tripped us the most. Setting up the motor and relay caused main issues to not allow water to be pumped out and the relay circuits not connecting to the pi.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Primarily getting the hardware set up - two of our teammates worked incessantly to get the pump motor and relay circuits to work in order for all the sensors and functionality of the pot to operate with the raspberry pi.

What we learned

The main thing was understanding how to connect the raspberry pi with GPIO connectors and how they channel both ways, learned how to create RESTful API’s using Flask, connecting the software to a Raspberry pi server, and exposing the data info onto the React front end.

What's next for Green Fields

Integrate it with your smart home system and also add more plants to a care list so that you can monitor a multitude of plant species. Add a social media interactive application that other’s can socialize and share pictures of their plants.