Digital Garden

Inspiration Our group had an interest in gardening, so we decided to create an app that could help the average person who has started this hobby. The biggest problem for people learning to garden is that they don't understand how to take care of them. Which is why we decided to create an app that would teach them the steps on how to treat their plants when they're sick. Learned We learned how to use tkinter with Python for Front-end development, how to train an AI model to diagnose diseases using numerical and a CNN. How to convert images to numerical data, and how to improve a CNN model. How it's built For the main engine, we used GitHub and VS Code. We used Google Colab to train the AI, and took several custom libraries from Sklearn, Google Colab, and NumPy. We trained our ML model through pandas, madplotlib, os, and TensorFlow. Challenges Our machine learning model struggled to process large databases efficiently, so we switched to running it on a GPU instead of CPU. We had to learn how to convert data from images to compare data from diseases by trying to find an api, but they were behind a paywall, so we taught our own ML model. a cure for a given image( we used a json file). We struggled finding a database or API which contains plants diseases and how to cure them so we disease to cure so we manually developed our own database.

Prob(sustainability, waste reduction,hard raising plants) - sol( - pitch(app functionality) - ques Benefits of growing food, growing interest

Abt gardening Ever since COVID, gardening has become a rapidly growing community, with around 14 million homes in Canada over 1 million Canadian households have planned to start growing their own food in a survey conducted by Dalhousie University in 2022. Survey Statistics Canada

Why should you start gardening? When asked about why Canadians garden, because they wanted to save money, because often the produce they grow is better than anything being sold in stores, but most importantly, BECAUSE. IT. IS. FUN.

Dificulties The biggest problem Canadians face is that they lack the space to start, when all you need to start is enough space for a pot to get lots of sunlight, either on a balcony or windowsill. Another problem people face is a lack of time, in a Canadians busy schedule, it is often hard to dedicate long periods of time to starting a new hobby. This is a common misconception; plants often do most of the work while only needing to be regularly taken care of, which could only take a few hours a week. Often, people are scared to start something new without knowing where to start. This can be intimidating, but with the rate of this hobby's growth, there is tons of information online on how to take care of plants. Starting gardening can be expensive when first starting, especially when buying supplies and tools, but over a long period of time, Canadians save more from growing their own produce rather than buying it, saving them a good amount of money over time.

Our project The goal for our app is to be able to help a person start and or continue gardening by helping diagnose and cure common diseases for plants. This can be done by taking a photo of the affected area and waiting for our AI’s one ML model to identify the plant, and multiple ML models per plant to diagnose the problem and provide a step-by-step solution to the problem.

Our vision With the help of this app, we hope to encourage more Canadians to have more sustainable lifestyles and hopefully change our society to a greener one and expand to different fields like agriculture and countries with their different plants and weather.