Passive Aggressive Plants

Your plants are fed up with your forgetting them!

Comment 2

Inspiration

We have all been there before. Picture this: you're brushing your teeth, munching on breakfast, or strolling with the pup; not a worry in the world. And yet, every once in a while, an eerie feeling can't help but creep in. A nagging sensation... Am I forgetting something?

Oh well! it probably wasn't that important anyway! And you go on with the rest of your day.

A few weeks pass: you are at work, and suddenly, you realize something... You dramatically drop your half eaten bagel on the ground and leave the coworker you were talking to in the dust.

You run as fast as you can, but no matter how fast you run, you feel you can't get home fast enough. After a 23 minute commute, you finally arrive.

You pause in front of the door, afraid of what you might see...

Finally, you can't wait any longer, so you apprehensively open the door. Tears fill your eyes and you are getting choked up. In a broken voice, you utter:

"Fredrick?"

There it is, your leafy companion, looking like it just went through a desert expedition with no water. Fredrick is shriveled up almost beyond recognition.

An angry gust of green guilt slaps you in the face. As you delicately hold Fredrick's lifeless body in your hands, you apologize and tell him how much he meant to you.

After having a deeply heartfelt moment, you get up, and say:

"Oh well! I'll just get another plant and do better next time"

As you chuck Fredrick into a pile of countless other dead plants.

We have all been there. Trust me.

What it does

The crux of this issue boils down to the fact that Fredrick the plant was obviously too polite.

"Passive Aggressive Plants" is an app designed to track the health of your plants. Using Arduino sensors, it monitors various factors such as soil moisture, sunlight exposure, and temperature. When the app detects that a plant is in distress, it sends the plant parent a heavy-handed, passive-aggressive message to remind them to tend to their plant's needs.

An additional shaming feature has been added as well: A Hall of Shame Leaderboard that shows all of your friends how terribly you mistreat your plants! We even send notifications to your parents so that they can tell you how disappointed in you they are!

How we built it

The web application has a Vue3 frontend and a Nodejs backend that connects to an Arduino. The Arduino posts data obtained from water and ph sensors at a sent interval, and when that comes through, the changes are presented on the Vue ui.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the issues we ran into include the following:

  • Sinking to much time into trying to get a project set up with a technology we were not familiar with
  • Development environment related issues

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really happy with the state of our web app right now! We are able to get responses from our node server to display that information onto you Vue applications. We have a plant home page that shows you the status of your plant and comes up with passive aggressive comments to tell you when the plant status is incorrect!

What we learned

Some valuable lessons we learned:

  • Stick with familiar technologies that we know work with our machines
  • System environments are really important
  • Don't cross your plants... or else

What's next for Passive Aggressive Plants

The future of Passive Aggressive Plants includes additional features and styling updates. Some things we want to do include:

  • Polish up the UI
  • Add more shaming mechanisms (We didn't get to add the alerts to the user's parents yet)
  • Create dedicated mobile application
  • Build hardware

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