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