Poqua

Pocket Aquarium

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Inspiration

Our inspiration stemmed from the conservation of aquatic species and the unethical practices of irresponsible fishkeepers. We noticed that many people start aquariums without having the proper knowledge of the species they buy or can check up on their aquariums when away from home. Our goal is to provide an application to educate people on becoming more responsible fishkeepers to promote the conservation of aquatic species and a way to more closely monitor their aquarium conditions to provide their fish friends with a safe and friendly environment.

What it does

Poqua is an aquarium tank monitor software application that gives users a platform to simulate their aquarium when away from home. Our application is meant to gather metrics such as water quality, temperature, and light levels in a fish tank measured by hardware (DHT11 Temperature Module, Photoresistor, Turbidity sensor) that the user is intended to place in their fish tank.

How we built it

This is a full-stack application that leverages React Native to manage user activity on the frontend and utilizes Google Firebase on the backend to store relevant application data in a Firestore database, Expo framework was utilized for testing in an iOS/android/web environment. Our hardware code is also written in Arduino, a variant of C++.

Challenges we ran into

Our team experienced challenges with developing our application using react native. All of us were relatively new to react native and mobile development, so using this technology required a lot of patience and learning from the React native documentation. We also faced the problem of getting our electronics to function properly and precisely.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are especially proud of our appealing UI and custom illustrations. We delegated a lot of our time and resources to providing users with a beautiful and aesthetically pleasing application.

What we learned

We learned a variety of new technologies, including Firebase, react native, expo, and Figma. An important lesson we learned was, properly planning out the architecture of projects before writing any code. A lack of understanding of how to organize our user workflow and how to organize our react components caused a huge setback and delayed the development of our application.

What's next for Poqua

The next steps for our project would be to flesh out the hardware component of our project to enhance the tracking of water parameters. We also considered exploring more possibilities of using our database to provide features such as viewing the aquariums of other users and managing data metrics from electronic components to be more interactive with the application.

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