BEST BUDS

Planting is a stress relieving hobby. This app can remind you to water your plants, give you general background on your plant, and update people on your plant.

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Inspiration

Everyone on the team is parents to plants and being in college it can be hard to remember to take care of a simple succulent. We've held countless plant funerals that could be easily avoided.

What it does

With this simple app, it would remind you to water your plant with Twilio functionality. It also provides general knowledge about your plant and tips/hacks on how to avoid plant fungal disease or giving your plants a nutritional boost through a database connected to an API key. Having plants to take care of can be stress relieving because greenery in a dorm room brightens the room a bit more. It also pushes you to have sunshine in your room which could feel relaxing. You can connect to other BestBuds user to share posts through a forum.

How we built it

Construction of our app began with creating an outline in GoodNotes. After our outline was made, two of our team members moved to XCODE using SwiftUI to begin work on our user interface. Interconnecting our code through Git took some time, but once it was completed, we were able to push/pull from each other. It was our first time using StoryBoarding in XCODE to create an app interface. We connected our sign-in page to a tab bar with five different tabs. As this was occurring, our other members were working on creating a mini plant database using Ragic as well as setting up Twilio messaging.

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge we encountered was setting up Twilio to be able to send messages from our account/laptop. The download times set us back a bit, but once we downloaded Visual Studios and talked with a mentor through @BrickHack. A CBrands mentor [Mark Foster] was very helpful in looking through our code and helping us locate the problems. Once our Twilio code was messaging we encountered the issue with connecting it into XCODE. In order to fix it, we would need to get a http, but using C# coding in Visual Studio hindered this process and as of right now, we haven't been able to connect it.

Another challenge we ran into was utilizing the Ragic database we made. We tried multiple downloads, such as converting it to a Google Sheets, Excel, .txt, .csv, and parsing through it in XCODE. After multiple failures we decided it was best to focus on the app design and the submission to devpost.

A setback that occurred was around 3am, two of our members fell asleep. One of our members has to drive back on March 6 (Sunday before the devpost is due). So we had three sleeping members and one confused on where every one. Not only did all three sleep through their respective timers, but once one woke up, it was 8oclock. This made us lose a good chunk of hacking time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Setting up Twilio to message through our account. We are super proud of connecting to Twilio and being able to send our messages to our app users.

Our graphic design template and logo were handmade and a lot of care was put into creating this app.

Storyboarding for user interface. We created an app that can be navigated by a user. This took countless hours on youtube, learning how to navigate XCODE and connect our view screens to each other.

What we learned

As a team we learned how to code in swift using XCODE and storyboarding. We also learned a bit of C# syntax to connect what we learned from Twilio messaging. Furthermore, we learned how to connect a database to API key and be able to import that data to be accessible to anyone.

What's next for BEST BUDS

Our next steps would be to connect all of components together. We would need to do more research on creating a http server from Twilio to connect it to our app. And then do more research on taking our API form Ragic and incorporating our plant data into our app. A final step would be to polish up our interface and learn more graphic design in SwiftUI.

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