Rooted

Rooted Dashboard
Rooted Garden
Rooted Plant View: Details
Rooted Plant View: Recommended Tasks
Rooted Add Plant

Inspiration

Many plant owners struggle to know exactly what their plants need. Overwatering, underwatering, or poor lighting are common problems because plant care often relies on guesswork. We wanted to remove that uncertainty by giving plants a way to communicate their needs through real data.

What it does

Rooted is a smart plant-care system that combines an outdoor sensor device with a companion web app. Our device monitors air temperature (°F), humidity, soil moisture, and light levels. This data is sent directly to our app where we compute these details into a plant health score along through an easy to understand display. Based on these real time conditions, Rooted provides actionable recommended tasks to users such as when your plant needs watering or whether lighting conditions are sufficient. Our app helps plant owners move from guessing to data-drive care.

How we built it

We combined hardware, IOT, and web technologies to develop Rooted. Sensor data is collected by the Arduino device and transmitted to our backend server, which processes and displays live plant metrics in the web application. Hardware/IOT

Arduino Uno Q board
Modulino Thermo and Humidity Sensor (DHT11)with C++ firmware
Arduino Water Moisture Sensor
Light Intensity Sensor (LDR)

Backend

Python
Flask API
JSON data handling

Frontend

React
TypeScript
HTML / CSS
Tailwind CSS
Figma & Adobe Illustrator (UI/UX)

Challenges we ran into

Connecting physical sensor hardware reliably to a live web application
Formatting and sending real-time data IoT data between Arduino and our backend
Synchronizing frontend updates with incoming sensor readings

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully sending live sensor data from an Arduino device to our web app
Building a full end-to-end IoT pipeline from hardware to backend to frontend
Creating an intuitive plant health visualization system
Integrating hardware, software, and UI design into one cohesive product

What we learned

How to integrate IoT hardware with web frameworks
How to communicate real-time data between embedded systems and web servers
Collaboration across hardware and software teams

What's next for Rooted

In the future, Rooted will continue to support users by expanding the variety of plants in our system, allowing for more personalized and species-specific care recommendations. When users add a new plant, Rooted will automatically populate the plant’s detail page with recommended care instructions tailored to that species. While we didn’t have time to fully implement this feature in the current version, the infrastructure is already in place, making it ready for future updates. Furthermore, we plan to enhance our plant health scoring model by incorporating historical sensor data and machine learning to better predict plant needs before issues arise. We also plan to introduce is a gallery feature, enabling users to take photos of their plants and track their growth and progress over time.