PlantPals

Inspiration

What if your plants could talk to you? That's what our team thought of when we faced the challenge of solving a problem in agriculture. There's nobody more important to reverse the effects of climate change than the next generation of children. That's why we created PlantPals, an interactive AI chat experience for kids to have a Tamagotchi-like companion that will help them connect with nature.

What it does

PlantPals collects data from plant soil to make an interactive AI chat experience for kids, helping them raise a plant, learn about biology, and build curiosity about the environment.

How we built it

Our team started by finding a moisture sensor to insert into a plant pot. The sensor transmits data to our database through a Raspberry Pi Pico running MicroPython. The data is fed to Google Gemini, which is prompted to role play as the plant and share educational, science-based information in a playful, engaging way.

Challenges we ran into

We had some trouble getting the Gemini API working with our initial SpringBoot backend, but we opted to switch everything over to FastAPI and write it with Python.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to say that we were able to implement a reactive webpage, interactive chatbot, and a hardware component all in 24 hours!

What we learned

We learned the basics of MicroPython and how to implement Gemini in code! We all have experience using Google's convenient frontend for accessing the bot, but it was a very cool experience to experiment and figure out how to interact with their backend.

What's next for PlantPals

We plan to flesh this idea out, particularly polishing up the hardware components, and bring it to market in order to improve the lives of children across the globe!