TalkingPlant

Inspiration

What it does

The project is designed to use various sensors to provide data to be used to help you take care of your plants and protect our planet. Using the collected data, soil moisture, temperature, and pH level, the TalkingPlant tells you if you need to water your plant, or if its to hot for it, or even if you need to adjust the acidity of your plant's soil, helping you take the best care you can of your plants, not only to see how beautiful they grow, but also to help combat climate change by creating carbon sinks.

How we built it

We built our project using primairily three sets of vital components: a RaspBerry Pi coded in Python, three sensors (moisture, temperature, and pH), and an ESP32 coded in Arduino IDE to send the messurements taken by the three sensors to our RaspBerry Pi over WiFi. It all starts with those three sensors. They send their readings to our ESP32, where they are converted to analog to digital if required, which is used to connect over WiFi on the same network to our Raspberry Pi. From there, the RaspBerry Pi 5, running on QNX Operating System, uses its python code, done through PuTTY and Vim, to analyse the data its sent to tell you if the the various messurements are in, above, or below the right range, telling you what to do to take care of your plant.

Challenges we ran into

Honestly, we encountered way more challenges then we expected. For example, before even getting to code anything, we had to spend hours on end working to setup the RaspBerry Pi 5 with SSH through PuTTY. After that, we had to learn how to use Vim and a lot of new circuitry like the circuitry for a RaspBerry Pi, which none of us had used until this weekend. After learning how to use those, we spent hours trying to connect a Seeeduino Nano to Arduino IDE to act as our ADC, as the ones we were given with the RaspBerry Pi kit could not be used for Python, and that never even worked due to a bug with Windows 11 and Seeeduino Nanos. After that, we switched to using a an Arduino Uno, which we spent the entirety of the second night trying to use to send Serial signals to the RaspBerry Pi, which never read them, until it was broken due to an ciruitry accident, forcing us to finally switch to a ESP32, which we then used to connect to the RaspBerry Pi over WiFi.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of going to our first ever UOttaHack and pushing through all the difficulties along the way! Despite the number of challenges we faced and roadblocks along the way, UOttaHack 8 was an amazing experiance for all of us, even as beginners. Most of all, we're proud of working as a group to acomplish something of meaning, that could help our planet.