The problem LensFleur solves

Horticulture employs approximately 58% of the Indian population. Every year, 15–25% of crops are damaged due to crop diseases. On an annual basis, the whole economic loss is roughly Rs. 50,000 crore.
Crop loss is a big blot on the economy, as is the possibility for many farmers whose entire source of income depends on these crops. The crop loss gets even more significant when 200 Indians go to bed hungry every night.

The primary cause of such massive losses is due to the following factors:

1. Diseases that go undetected.
2. Diseases that were detected but not treated correctly.
3. Disease is discovered too late to prevent crop failure.

The current approach to dealing with this scenario is unsustainable, resulting in starvation, soil erosion, and a variety of other problems. Farmers living in distant areas lack access to, and sometimes the means to finance, proper disease management. In the long term, this becomes a sustainability issue caused by farmers' lack of understanding as well as inappropriate treatment procedures that lead to resource deterioration.

Regardless of the cause of crop loss, farmers bear the brunt of the consequences.

Lensfleur provides a dynamic, user-friendly solution to all of the problems described above under a single roof, including providing farmers with full crop health details, organic and inorganic treatment, a one-on-one chat window with specialists, and product comparison, all available to them through a medium and a language that is most comfortable to them.

Challenges we ran into

This project was designed and built with the ease of use and the accessibility of the end users in mind, which here is the specific niche of famrers, agriculturalists, and conservationists. As such, it was important to incorporate as many features that woud be truly beneficial to novice or an expert, which include accessing the service and the help they need in the format and the language that is most accessible to them, allowing them to receive help from and connect with specialized experts in their field, or their area, who will be able to interact with them for a fee and give them the best course of action to take.

And as such, one of the biggest challenges that we encountered while building the project was integrating all the features into a single service while still keeping the consistency and validity across all the front end HTML and CSS pages, making sure the Flask framework was designed and implemented in such a way that all the pages and resources that are required load quickly and efficiently through the browser, and the additional APIs that we are incorporating are done so in accordance with our architecture. We faced several testing sessions where the page would face high latency in responding to simple commands, crash the page itself, or throw unexpected python errors resulting from the routing commands originating from the HTML pages. To overcome these challenges we had to perform the fixes in pair programming, where one member fixed the code, while the other constantly monitored for consistency and syntactical correctness, which allowed for efficient building.