Plant B

Our Logo
Screenshot of the CAD drawing of our pot
UI Design in Figma
Working with Qualcomm

Problem Space:

Like pets, plants can bring people emotional and psychological comfort. This comfort also gives people a sense of guilt and disappointment when it becomes ill due to lack of care, especially when the owner goes on trips away from home. To solve this problem, the industry has developed Micro Automatic Drip Irrigation Systems; however, this is not enough for the plant to thrive. Each plant has its own need, and it is important to consider its relation to its energy sources of sun and water. Too much or too little of either can result in future complications in raising the plant.

Goal:

Design a plant maintenance system that can be used by plant owners who are away from their plants to rotate and water the plants based on detected light and humidity data that maintains their health and aesthetics during these times.

Backend and Hardware:

For hardware, we chose Qualcomm's DragonBoard hack kit because it contains essential sensors and chips which we can apply our software skills upon. We had to perform a cross compilation from our x86 Linux workstation to the ARM-based DragonBoard because we were unable to install cmake on the board. After we built the MRAA and UPM libraries, we installed them on the board with GPIO pins to read from provided light and humidity sensors. We also explored various methods on how to incorporate a servo to allow for rotation, though we decided to focus on other parts of the project due to software issues.

Frontend and Design:

For frontend, we made an interface informing the users of the current status of their plants. We began by designing the interface on Figma as a team, working out interactive components, colours, and a logo. Once we finished this, we transitioned the design into code in React. This allowed for visualization of the data collected from the sensors.

In order to make the project more visible and less theoretical, we also built a physical model by designing a pot with Solidworks and printed it with the 3D printer. Though we made a small calculation error in the dimensions with relation to the servo, we managed to sand it down to fit together. The resulting model demonstrates how our hardware connects with the pots and how the pot rotates when the sun hits.

Challenges along the way:

In this project, one of the barriers we faced was with the Dragonboard since we were unfamiliar with its software and hardware components. Many software issues we had were in regards to the installation of required libraries. This led to us spending a large portion of our time trying to understand why certain libraries could not be fetched. These problems ended up impacting how we could use our hardware, further adding to the challenge we were having with understanding the functionality of the pieces. We eventually found a way to by-pass many of the software problems through cross-compiling, which allowed us to skip some installations that caused issues for the hardware.

Another big obstacle was making the Figma design actual code. We encountered bugs within features because we had not fully worked out implementation details during the initial design process. As a result, we had to spend time removing unnecessary, redundant, and distracting features, but it resulted in a cleaner interface and implementation.

Things we learned through this Makeathon:

During this Makeathon, our team divided up jobs and distributed the roles by interest. Our team's largest takeaway was learning how to set up hardware and understanding how hardware can interact with software. We also learned how to plan and create a complete project, from brainstorming ideas to the final implementation.

Direction for the next iteration and its impact on society:

For the next iteration, we are going to use more sensors to collect a larger variety of data so that we can use more detailed information toe analyze the status of the plant with increased accuracy. We also plan to connect the frontend and the backend more efficitiently using Solace. This would allow for us to better share information on the accessibility of gardening in urban areas. Besides providing comfort, urban planting and agriculture is a viable solution in response to the growing concerns over food safety since they are grown by the owner. This also promotes a more eco-friendly lifestyle as it reduces unnecessary energy loss that is generated in food transportation while bringing more plants to areas that tend to have more severe air pollution.