Plantagochi

Inspiration

With our busy lives, remembering to take care of our plants was hard. That’s when we came up with an idea to discover a fun and interactive way to take care of them. That’s where the idea came to us — to make a Tamagotchi like game where we bring our plants to life, adding personality, emotions, and interactions that respond to how well we take care of them. By combining technology with nature, we wanted to make plant care not just a responsibility, but an engaging and enjoyable experience.

What it does

This product integrates an interactive game with the normally mundane task of caring for plant. It provides users with insight into their plant’s general health while encouraging consistent and responsible care habits. We integrated a plant health monitoring system ie. moisture sensors, light sensors, and temperature/humidity sensors with our own version of the Tamagotchi game, where the plant’s health stats are directly controlled by the sensors.

How we built it

Hardware: Our electronics team was in charge of formulating all the hardware into a portable module that can be directly integrated with any plant. The sensors we decided to use was a photo-resistor module, temperature and humidity module, and a soil moisture sensor. All of this was soldered onto a perfboard along with an OLED for displaying plant selection and an interactive ui bringing our plant to life. We decided to use an ESP-32 dev board to bring it all together.

Firmware: Firmware was then implemented into the module by our electronics team, where all the modules were implemented on certain analog and digital pins on the board.

Software: We used an ESP-32 to send https request to a Node.js server which talked to our FireStore database and stored data we then sent an api request to openai to generate some details on the plant and send those back to the ESP-32 to play animations corresponding to the given emotion.

Challenges we ran into

Firmware integration with software was one of our biggest challenges, as most of us do not have a lot of experience with this kind of integration. It took us a lot of troubleshooting, but in the end we were able to get it working.

Getting api requests to call when we are sending bytes at a time really mess up your calls.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the way we were able to combine all levels of design, including hardware, firmware, and software to create a cohesive product that works well all together. We were able to achieve most of our goals, and give our user's the intended experience that we envisioned.

What we learned

We learned that integrating three levels of design, requires proper time allocation and that certain aspects need to be completed earlier than others, in order to complete the product on time. We also learned a lot about ESP32 firmware integration, and data processing.

What's next for Plantagochi

We plan to take this further, by refining the app to have a seamless experience from startup to actually playing the game itself. We would have also liked to organize the electronics and create a better casing for the product.