Xylem

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Inspiration

We chose to focus on the sustainability track and create a tool that helps users become more informed about plants and flora. Our goal was to provide digestible information about plant care, including sunlight requirements, watering needs, growth rate, and difficulty level. We wanted to make it easier for people to discover plants and understand how to care for them.

What it does

Our website, Xylem, allows users to browse and filter through a database of 350+ plant species, each with growth and care information. Every plant profile includes data such as growth rate, sunlight requirements, soil type, fertilization needs, and care difficulty. Our filters make it easy to find relevant results based on these characteristics.

How we built it

We built Xylem using a plant dataset from Kaggle, which we cleaned and structured before uploading it into our SQLite database. In addition, we used the Wikimedia API to fetch images for each plant in our database. The frontend was built with React and Tailwind CSS to create a responsive, user-friendly interface.

Challenges we ran into

One of our main challenges was sourcing reliable images for our database. We encountered API rate limits and struggled to find relevant image sources. We also spent time on multiple revisions to our database schema to improve filtering. Additionally, debugging the UI and thoroughly testing the application required significant effort.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have built a plant discovery tool that successfully integrates a plant dataset with a clean user interface.

What we learned

We learned to adapt and pivot when we encountered challenges throughout the project. We gained valuable experience using Git for version control and improved our collaboration skills by working closely as a team.