GardenBox

Making the art of gardening an easy, efficient, and reliable source of food.

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Inspiration

GardenBox is an innovative mobile app changing the way you garden. These difficult times have left many people wondering how they can better their community and make a positive impact. Unbeknownst to many, one of the best ways to make that impact is by going green and gardening. Gardening has many benefits: weight loss, stress reduction, and a healthier environment. However, one of the biggest benefits of gardening is that it is one of the healthiest and safest means of food production. Despite these positive benefits, however, many people struggle to successfully grow a garden. Inspired by this problem, as well as our joint passion for gardening, we created GardenBox.

What it does

GardenBox’s two primary components – a physical device and a mobile application– allow the user to maximize their crop output, allowing for a steady stream of food to sustain themselves. The user links the device to their phone, chooses the crop they are trying to grow and installs the device by placing it into the soil, next to the crop. After the link has been established, the device reads in the light, humidity, and temperature data of the plant the user is trying to grow. Using an API, the device sends the data to the mobile application, which compares the given data to the ideal conditions in which the plant grows. After comparing the data, the app provides the user with intuitive suggestions in order to promote the growth and food output of these plants. By doing so, we hope to provide users with a safe and reliable avenue for food consumption, as well as limiting food wastage.

How we built it

The application user interface was made using the iOS app development SDK powered by swift. The physical device was built using a moisture sensor and photo-resistor connected to an arduino. These two are integrated using an arduino plug-in and the Google Sheets Api. The user interface is designed so that any user can easily understand and use the app from the moment they pick it up.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was working on the hardware aspect of our project, while being miles apart from each other. When it comes to coding the project, there were multiple ways to work together, but not nearly as many for working on hardware. This proved to be our primary issue throughout the hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of the fact that we were not only able to create such a helpful and reliable app in a short amount of time, but that we were able to make it look really good as well. We all strive to do whatever we do to the best of our ability, and making a clean looking app was something that was important for us.

What we learned

We learned so much about working together, and many other things as well. One of the biggest things however, was how to operate under pressure. Hackathons are a high pressure coding environment, and learning how to handle that pressure was a great experience for all of us.

What's next for GardenBox

GardenBox has so much potential, and we plant to tap into that. We want to expand upon the crops that we currently offer, and add things like fruits as well. We believe they sky's the limit for GardenBox.

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