MyPlantPal

MyPlantPal and its data on a local and mobile server.
Back panel
Front View
Top Sensor

Inspiration

From leaving a succulent on my radiator over winter break, to drowning an orchid until all its flowers wilted, many plants have been subjected to the wrath of my absent-minded undergraduate self. When I finally found the time to tend to my floral friends, I needed to remedy weeks of inattention and dreamed of a convenient, accessible means to nip plant neglect in the bud.

What it does

MyPlantPal tracks data metrics of your plants (temperature, humidity, growth, light level), and uploads their data to a live server database, which you can access remotely from your phone or laptop. The tracker module also has a built-in interactive LCD console, allowing you to view your data

How we built it

On an Arduino UNO, MyPlantPal uses an ultrasonic sensor to measure growth, a photoresistor to measure sunlight, a temperature sensor, and a humidity sensor. The data is processed in C++ and then transferred to bytes. The Arduino UNO transfers the bytes to a Python program that decodes them as values, processes them, forms a set of data sent to a FIREBASE database, and from there, it is fetched on a live website. The website is made purely with javascript CSS and HTML, and for testing we used MySQL to have a local copy of data, and for actual deployed website we use Firebase online database.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first embedded project so there was a lot of reading documentation. One defective temperature sensor set us back some time debugging, but ultimately we reaped what sowed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We finalized a physical prototype, fully compatible with the FIREBASE server.

What we learned

We have learned how to complete an embedded project connected with a front-end and back-end web application. It was a feat of collaboration and ultimately we prevailed.