PlantTrackr (without the E)

Inspiration

PlantTrackr was inspired by two of the challenges many plant owners face. Firstly: how difficult it can be to tell why your plant is dying. Things like brown spots, dead branches, or wilted leaves can be symptoms of too much water, too little water, too much sun, too little sun... it never gets easier. The second issue is having a way to take care of your houseplants when you're away. If you go home for a school break, go on vacation for several weeks, or are away from home for any other reason, you may have to come up with creative solutions to keep your more delicate houseplants from withering away in your absence. PlantTrackr will help to solve both of these problems by collecting data on plant environmental conditions and allowing you to set up a remote plant watering system.

What it does

In your home, PlantTrackr collects data from temperature, light, and moisture sensors. Data from these sensors is communicated to our database, and will be able to be viewed through our website. On the website, you can set profiles for each of your plants, including a name, picture, and other parameters like the minimum moisture level you want the soil to reach and the amount of water you want dispensed into the pot when that level is detected.

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we encountered was getting our website to communicate with our MQTT broker. Although our raspberry pi successfully collects data, sends it to the broker, and takes appropriate actions based on messages received from the broker, we weren’t able to make MQTT work via the Angular framework used to build the website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our code successfully publishes to and reads from an MQTT broker, collecting a variety of data and sending it though dedicated topics for each plant.

What we learned

What's next for PlantTrackr (without the E)

The next step for PlantTrackr is to solve the communication issues between our website and the MQTT data broker. This will allow for the seamless integration of data collection, using actuators to affect plants’ environment, and being able to monitor your personal library of plants.

Built With

• angular.js
• firebase
• mosquitto
• raspberry-pi