Team 03 - Potera

Potera Team Members
Potera’s System Design
User Interface
Hardware & Software

Inspiration

While keeping plants indoors may brighten our mood, keeping them alive is not easy. Potera is a smart add-on to the traditional pot with automatic features to maintain the plants’ survival and healthy growth while teaching beginners how to plant. It contains sensors to collect various types of data in a pot of plants. Based on the feedback, it can automatically water the plant, provide sufficient lighting and add compost for fertilization. The App would also provide content to teach beginners relevant planting skills to retain their passion for gardening instead of giving up. Potera is designed for beginners to planting and people with a busy schedule but wants to garden.

What it does

Potera’s light sensing uses photoresistors installed around the pot to evaluate which side has less light exposure. Using this data, Potera automatically turns on a portion of our LED light strip, also attached around the perimeter, to supplement light to the corresponding darker areas.

Potera uses a capacitive soil moisture sensor to analyze water content in the pot. Once Potera detects that soil moisture is too low, the app will notify the user to add water. Potera employs a pump system that pumps water to the bottom of the pot, helping roots grow efficiently.

Customers can use the Potera App to remotely monitor the plant’s condition and enable the watering and lighting functions through the NodeMCU. Whether customers use Potera to fully automate or guide their planting process, Potera makes your indoor planting experience flexible, effortless, and fun.

How we built it

Potera consists of three key systems: watering, lighting, and airflow. Each system is uniquely designed to monitor the plant’s surrounding conditions and maintain a favorable growth environment. The photoresistor and moisture sensor will take the sensor inputs and send the data to Blynk through Wi-Fi. The software will then compare these inputs to the optimal light intensity and moisture level for the user's plant, giving corresponding instructions.

What's next for Potera

We intend on developing larger models capable of caring for multiple plants, more specialized products based on plant types and specific functions, and other expansions to our product line to give customers more flexibility in their planting. With a distribution and marketing model based on local partners and a product/app design focused on being beginner-friendly and simple, we foresee Potera bringing even more exciting and fruitful planting experience to fellow planters.