Norbel Farms

Inspiration

One of the key challenges farmers face is making informed decisions about crop management, especially when it comes to tillage. Farmers need to constantly consider soil conditions, weather patterns, equipment availability, and timing to ensure that their land is properly prepared for planting. Suboptimal tilling can lead to poor soil conditions, lowering crop yields and wasting resources. In addition to these challenges, they need to maximize the benefits of their decisions while being constrained by equipment and labor costs.

What it does

Norbel Farms is a chatbot designed to assist farmers with custom tillage recommendations. Farmers can provide details like farm location, equipment inventory, and anticipated tilling date through text, voice, or image input. Powered by real-time weather information from OpenWeatherMap, Norbel Farms offers actionable recommendations for optimal tilling, including expected costs, tilling duration, and required equipment. This information is further enhanced with an interactive 3D visualization, showing a satellite view of the farm (via the Google Maps API) with 3D models of the required farming equipment.

How we built it

We built norbelfarms using Next.js and Babylon.js, utilizing external APIs like openweathermap.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we faced was integrating the interactive 3D visualization with the chatbot. We tried several different visualization libraries like Three.js before landing on Babylon.js. We also scoured the internet for 3D models of various tilling and farming tools to dynamically add in the visualization. To display the visualization, our code extracts relevant location information from the user's prompt to understand which farm they are referring to. Next, it uses the Google Maps API to fetch a satellite view of the farm. The code generates a 3D rendering of the farm and processes the user prompt to place models of relevant farming tools on the farm.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how our project presents weather data, 3D farm visualizations, and farming equipment suggestions through a clean and intuitive interface. Our chatbot is able to process multiple input modalities to make it more accessible for farmers. We are especially proud of our interactive farm model to make it easier for farmers to visualize the tools they need to optimally till their farms.

What we learned

While creating our project, we gained valuable experience working with a variety of frameworks and technologies. We used Next.js to build a clean UI and organized codebase to integrate multiple APIs. We used OpenAI endpoints to process multimodal user input, and learned how to access microphone input on a web browser. We learned how to use the Google Maps API and Babylon.js for the 3D farm visualization. This project also helped us hone our skills in web development.