Tree Surgeon

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  ESP-32 connected to water level sensor

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  ESP-32 with temperature and humidity sensor, water moisture sensor and water level sensor

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  Water level sensor testing

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  ESP-32 and water moisture sensor testing

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  Checking humidity and temperature

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  ESP-32 Wroom-32D 30 Pin

Inspiration

We wanted to create something to spread awareness about climate change in our respective communities. Having an international team from across the globe, with greenhouse gases hotspots such as London and Chennai being our home cities, we decided on prototyping a handy device which helped nurture something cheap and practical like a plant, and turn it into a therapeutic mindfulness exercise that also helps to make the world a bit more green!

What it does

Tree surgeon allows you to monitor your plant on the go! Sensor values are sent to our website, additionally a push notification can alert you from your phone.

How we built it

An ESP-32 development board was used to connect the sensor to WIFI. We then create a website and used API to send push emails.

Challenges we ran into

During coding, due to faults in the implementation of the ESP-32 library to Arduino, many hours were lost trying to locate missing library headers such as "AsyncTCP.h". Certain libraries were catered specifically to ESP8266, which also caused problems. Some libraries also required dependencies that were hard to discover. Moreover, we changed board from a Mega 2560 to an ESP-32 as the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities proved superior.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite coming into the competition having never met before, never worked on sending data over the internet, never sent emails out to recipients and having it be three of our members first hackathon, we managed to produce a project we are very proud of.

What we learned

We learnt the importance of setting time goals, assigning roles and also how to be flexible. As we lived in different time zones, (Very drastic ones) we had to work around each other schedule. But we also learnt how much dedication pays off, even though we had progress checks at awkward timings (to say the least) we still managed to produce a (semi)-working website and hardware component.

What's next for the Tree Huggers

We want to complete certain features that we didn't have time to fully implement like adding the email pushing to the frontend of our website. We also had plans to add a 'Find-Your-Plant feature' just in case your plant likes to go for walkies.

Built With

• bootstrap
• c++
• courier
• css
• html5
• javascript
• swao