Root Radar

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  The Blue Morpho Butler helps me properly ferment my cacao, making sure I don't forget to stir my beans.

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  Mapping my plants.

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  Adding new plants to the map is easy.

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  The app keeps track of important data & informs me when my harvest is ready.

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Inspiration

This project was born out of the sweat and soil of Finca Montezuma, my own chocolate farm in Bocas del Toro, Panama. Managing hundreds of Cacao trees, tracking fermentation batches, and predicting harvests in a tropical rainforest is a logistical nightmare. I wanted to stop drowning in spreadsheets and start listening to the land.

What it does

Root Radar is an offline-first "Digital Farm Butler" that makes me sweat less, literally. It tracks every cacao tree's lifecycle, monitors real-time fermentation temperatures, and logs harvest yields. The core feature is the "Blue Morpho Butler," an AI agent that analyzes farm data (weather, tide, harvest history) to give actionable advice like "Turn the fermentation box now" or "Fungal risk high: prune tomorrow." It works even when the internet is down, syncing seamlessly when back online.

Challenges we ran into

Deployment on the Edge. We faced a persistent "Lettuce" caching bug where old versions of the app wouldn't die, forcing us to engineer a "Trojan Horse" deployment strategy to bypass the browser cache. We also battled Serverpod Cloud secret management, dealing with "HTTP 500" crashes due to missing JWT keys, which required a forensic reconstruction of our production environment, all while the jungle internet cut in and out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a truly resilient AI Butler. Instead of just a chatbot, it has "Tools" to actively record database entries (Harvests, Fermentations) from natural language. We also conquered the "Offline-First" requirement using Serverpod's caching, ensuring the farm runs even during tropical storms. And finally, fixing the production server via a "Nuclear" reset and "Trojan" frontend injection feels like a massive DevOps victory.

What we learned

We learned that "Latest" isn't always "Greatest": sometimes you have to revert to a stable backend to move forward. We deepened our mastery of Flutter Web's service workers & Serverpod's authentication flow. We also learned that nature is unpredictable, but code should be reliable.

What's next for Root Radar

Integrating IoT sensors for automated fermentation temperature logging. Connecting the supply chain to a blockchain for "Tree-to-Bar" traceability. And expanding the "Blue Morpho" personality to handle more complex agronomy queries.

Built With

• antigravity
• openweathermap