Plantica — Stop killing your plants
Because plants can't send texts ... yet.
Created on 9th November 2024
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Plantica — Stop killing your plants
Because plants can't send texts ... yet.
The problem Plantica — Stop killing your plants solves
We all live in urban worlds - all concrete, no soil. So we buy a plant.
But within the next month or two, most of our plants breathe their last. Dead.
70% of the time it's overwatering, the other is underwatering.
If you're an adult, it's easy to just buy an automated sprinkler which turns on or off at a set time (let's face it, it's hard enough to feed ourselves, how do we keep a plant alive?).
Guess what. That way, this generation's kids won't learn that plants need watering, ever.
Our app Plantica will help cultivate good habits in a new plant caretaker.
It reminds them to water the plant every day.
Not just remind, it will make you water it, as all you need sometimes is a strong push to action with push notifications.
When you don't water it, it'll say the darndest things like:
"Water, water, water ... I swear I see a mirage in this desert!"
"It's more likely for a dog to pee on me, than YOU ever watering me."
When you do give water, but it's way too much water for the plant, it might say:
- "Stop, stop, stop! Are you trynna kill me? It's a lot of water for me to drink in a day."
Who can say no to that? 😏
But when you water it enough, it'll thank you, but getting compliments is not that easy.
- "Are you actually watering me today? Nah, maybe it's just raining."
- "Thank you for watering me. I'll repay you with oxygen and lots of fruits / flowers."
Currently, we have a real-time graph of our plant's moisture level, and it's so accessible, even a blind man could do it (with TalkBack)!
Our future scope is to:
- implement sleep mode on hardware level to keep the device running for months
- ability to add multiple plants from the app
- set moisture (%) threshold for specific plants from app e.g Cactus needs less water
- customise our app icon and have an Android widget based on the plant's watering status
- remember your watering streak (e.g. 38 days of continuous watering)
- unlock nicer messages
Challenges we ran into
Connecting to the MQTT server running on Raspberry Pi was a trouble because our port was blocked.
Enabling said port in firewall didn't work.
Turns out, we had to change our MQTT broker config from just listening to localhost - to the IP address.
Here are a few more:
- Converting UTC to local time
- Implementing line chart graph
- Making Android app connect over http in production mode
- Finding the right libraries
Tracks Applied (1)
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