Flora

66% of households around the world have houseplants with 50% of those houseplants dying within the first year. The #1 reason for this is water, however, now there is an easier way to keep track

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☁️ Inspiration

Trying to come up with creative ideas was especially difficult. Brainstorming many ideas until we ended up getting off-topic. One group member was complaining about how their plant died that day which is where this idea came to.

⚙️ What it does

Currently, our app has two options. You can either pick from our database of plants to add to your list or add a custom plant. Each plant has different watering cycles so we know it can be hard to keep track, that's why Flora does that for you. Flora allows the user to keep tabs on their plant's water cycle and notifies you when the next time your plant needs to be watered. Flora also tracks the weather in Toronto. If it's raining your watering cycle will reset or if it's snowing we'll let you know to bring your plant inside. If the conditions are all clear then your water cycle will remain the same.

🔨 How we built it

We built Flora using Java and Android Studio. Java was used to grab information from the OpenWeatherMap API so we can track the current live weather conditions in Toronto. We also used Java to add functionality to the buttons in Android Studio. We used Android Studio as our UX/UI program. We took our Java code and integrated it into Android Studio so our users can interact with the application.

💀 Challenges we ran into

The two biggest challenges were grabbing the current temperature and weather conditions from the OpenWeatherMap API and grabbing inputs from the user to add their own custom plants to their list of plants. The way we solved the former was through lots of trial and error, we were eventually able to grab the necessary information. The latter may not sound that difficult on paper, however, adding our user's inputs to our database required us to write and read from internal files which were difficult to set up.

💪 Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall we are really proud of what we achieved in such a brief period of time. Our biggest accomplishment was figuring out how to create a slider in which our users can scroll up and down our database as well as interact and view the information within.

🧠What we learned

We learned many things in the last two days, such as:

  • How to use API's
  • How to create a mobile app
  • How to create and use a database
  • How to transfer and interact with Java code using Android Studio
  • That there are many different interesting plants!

🍀 What's next for Flora

We have some plans already in store for Flora that we would like to share. Firstly, we would like to have an option for selecting whether your plant is an indoor or outdoor plant. Secondly, we are adding more information about our plants to our database and expanding it for our users. Finally, we would like to add more information that could be available to the user such as soil level, soil conditions, water intake, sun exposure and more that can't be known just by looking at the plant.

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