Grow Smart

Inspiration

We took inspiration from the hackathon's theme itself! The "Wild West" was a dangerous frontier back in the 1600s, and we inferred that many honest working layman couldn't wait to leave and maybe start their own farms!

What it does

We provide the necessary weather and soil information for anyone, anywhere, to facilitate them in growing their farm! Simply by inputting your location, we output a table of the weather forecast over the next week.

How we built it

We used Python Flask as our backend and connected it to Vanilla JavaScript (with the help of a little JQuery), HTML and CSS. With open-meteo's weather APIs, we queried weather data for anywhere in the world (including soil moisture, humidity, temperature, precipitation chance, and more! JQuery aided us in tracking page count and more.

Challenges we ran into

One massive challenge was the amount of time spent trying to integrate React.js. It took us about five hours to finally get it basically working, but it was already late and we knew it would take much too much time to fully work in. So, we instead shifted the majority of us to our backup plan - a vanilla JS/HTML/CSS frontend that used Flask as an API endpoint and a router.

Another challenge was scope, as we planned too much too early, and were then overwhelmed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the fact that this is our first hackathon and many of us' first web app! Some of us have never used JS, HTML or CSS. We're proud of how nice our UI came out of despite not having a reactive component. We're also proud of our determination, as we worked into the late night hours (6am, even with daylight savings moving it back an hour) and were finally able to pull of a functioning web app.

What we learned

In general, we learned how to problem-solve, debug, and use our resources. Specifically, we all became much more familiar with JS/CSS/HTML/Python and Flask, and one of our members spent a large amount of time with React, and now can implement it. Many of us learned Git and GitHub for the first time!

What's next for Grow Smart

We're going to integrate React.js, add a machine-learning style predictor for soil fertility and crop stocks/prices. We'll add a database that we'll self-write, a login and try and deploy it alongside one of our member's already deployed web apps on his Raspberry PI!