Sprout

Note

All project code was created during the duration of the hackathon.

Inspiration

We realized that a lot of our backyard space could be utilized for something useful. We realized that by gardening we are not only providing ourselves with edible resources but also benefitting the environment. We are confident this app can change the way gardening works.

What it does

Sprout intelligently uses AI and creates a virtual garden that gives you an insight into your future full-fledged garden.
The Sprout app uses AI to scan a possible gardening space. In return the app will give you all sorts of information, for example, what kinds of plants are able to grow in that area, the plants growth requirements, and how it fits in with the rest of your garden.
You can create multiple virtual gardens and in each, you can add as many plants as your garden area can hold. Sprout will manage all your gardens and guide you in the most environmentally beneficial way possible.

How we built it

We built our app using flutter. We started by modeling our UI in Figma. We planned out our app carefully so that our goal of reducing carbon emissions could be met. We chose flutter in order to include both iOS and Android users in our app. We built out our Figma design in Flutter. We hooked up our project with Firebase where we used the Cloud Firestore to store all of our data. We use streams to get realtime updates from the database. We used the Treffle api to fetch real plants to fit in our user's gardens! We used AR core with flutter in order to have our users calculate the area of their gardens.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge we ran into was getting the google ml kit working. The AR measuring tool took quite a bit of trial and error to get it to work. Other issues we had were related to app scrolling issues and unnecessary widget rendering.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

An accomplishment we are proud of was getting the app together. We were able to implement most of the features we had in mind, although we had much more ideas we wanted to add, we are still proud of what we were able to build within these 24 hours.

What we learned

We learned more about working with API's with flutter. We also learned about the usefulness of raspberry pi from one of the workshops we attended.

What's next for Sprout

Hopefully, we can further advance the AI and get the scanning feature fully functional and more reliable. Furthermore getting the app published to the app and play store would boost our apps feedback and what we can improve on. Our next goal is to bring our platform to a wide audience through marketing. In terms of technical goals, we want to perfect our garden area calculation to make it super accurate in all circumstances. Our area calculation works, but we think we can make it even better to provide a better user experience to our users.