MyPlantFriend

Inspiration

For the average human, around 8 % of our carbon footprint comes from food alone. As someone who is passionate about climate change, I wanted to use my skills to create an app that helped carve this ever-evolving problem. I wanted to be able to promote sustainability far and wide and show that growing your own food is not as hard as it seems. Thus, I created MyPlantFriend, a user-friendly app to promote sustainability.

What it does

The app that I created is a plant care app that gives users an abundance of information on how to start their own garden, which plants to start growing, how to grow them etc. Users can choose from a variety of vegetables and get any info they need regarding gardening such as how much water to give their plant, how to fertilize it, how much sun it needs etc. Also, a major problem with new gardeners is that they always forget to care for their plant and end up killing it. However, with MyPlantFriend you have your own checklist that you can use to check off all your gardening tasks such as watering, misting, and fertilizing your plants. Therefore, MyPlantFriend users will never kill another plant!

How we built it

I built this app using android studios, with Java programming language.

Challenges we ran into

A challenge I ran into when building this app was the time crunch. I didn't get to build as many features as I wanted to for my app. This was also my first time ever making an app and coding in java. I have only been coding for a couple of months in python, so to make an app in a different language was a bit of a challenge at first. It was a different environment and I had to learn skills in order to be successful. I was also doing this project independently so sometimes I felt if I had some more people I could have made the app more successful and robust.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Personally, since this was my first time making an app, and coding with java I am just proud that I actually finished it. I know it seems simple, but I am proud of myself for figuring out how to code things like the drop-down menu and the checklist by myself.

What we learned

I learned so much during this experience, as it is only my second hackathon. The obvious skill that I learned was how to code in java, and how to use Android Studio. I picked up so many new skills on android studio and can't wait to expand my app with all the new knowledge i have picked up along the way. I also did several of the workshops and was exposed to so many different technologies and new skills.

What's next for MyPlantFriend

What's next for MyPlantFriend Honestly, I just want to expand the app to the best of my ability. I would love to improve the design, add more features such as a reminder system to give the user a notification when they need to water their plant. I would also like to eventually code this app so it can run not just on android, but on the iPhone as well.

Built With

• android-studio
• api27
• java