Farmunity | Devpost

😇Project Overview

Farmunity is where neighborhoods bloom together. Instead of relying on one shared garden, Farmunity transforms private backyards into vibrant pockets of community farming. Through our app, neighbors team up to grow their favorite fruits and veggies—and earn rewards while doing so! It's not just about growing food—it's about growing connections. Local farmers and distributors also get a fresh way to showcase their harvests, bringing farm-to-table even closer to home. Join us and turn every lawn into a local food movement!

🤩Inspiration

We were inspired by the belief that local agriculture is the future of farming. Mass agricultural production has left a heavy mark on our environment—contributing to deforestation, water pollution, and soil degradation. Yet at the same time, in our own suburban neighborhoods, we saw a different kind of waste: backyards brimming with avocado and orange trees, their fruits falling to the ground, rotting away, forgotten and untouched. The sweet potato leaves we once carefully planted eventually grew wild, untended, as no one felt the incentive to harvest them like we used to. We realized something powerful: with a little community spirit and the right tools, this overlooked abundance could be transformed into something meaningful. That's why we built Farmunity — to help neighborhoods reconnect with the land, with their food, and with each other.

🤔What it does

🫕How we built it

On our mobile app development side we utilized Android Studio to code with Flutter and Dart, allowing us to create and support users across multiple platforms. With the help of emulators we were able to test frequently and extensively on Android Pro 9 vanilla devices to make sure the user experience had a natural feel and performed exceptionally. Also, Flutter's wide variety of plugins and libraries helped us make use of Google Maps API, Apple’s modals, geolocators, and more to enable a seamless and user-friendly design that would meet the ever changing needs of students in University.

To help support our back end and database functions, we made sure to use Firebase to ensure that any data from the user and the transactions are handled with state of the art security. With firebase we played close attention to the authentication process and database functions. In the end we made sure to bring together these two dynamic and unique technologies to build a cohesive system that is for neighbors within the local community. By working with these technologies we effectively optimize performance for our campus bike-sharing initiative.

For our back end, we chose Firebase to manage both authentication and database functions, ensuring that user data and bike-sharing transactions are handled securely and efficiently. This cloud-based solution provides real-time updates and robust data management, making it an ideal choice for a dynamic and scalable platform. By seamlessly integrating these technologies, we have built a cohesive system that enhances user experience, guarantees security, and optimizes performance for our campus bike-sharing initiative.

😰Challenges we ran into

One of our most difficult challenges that we ran into on the technical side was managing the Gradle builds, figuring out how our code can both with ios and android, and the stability of the emulators. This would cost us a lot of time and having to also manage the dependencies, build failures, updates, and other things that would go wrong trying to repeatedly rebuild the Gradle which hurt our development progress significantly.

Furthermore, the emulator would often crash on us and we had a unique issue where some of our code wouldn't work with others computers because the code only accommodated for ios and not android. In order to try and overcome this we upgraded our Gradles and dependencies were configured optimally, cache the dependencies when we had the chance, and make our debugging approach more efficient to minimize downtime. Eventually it came down to a point where we had been stuck on this one issue for more than 4 hours and had to make the decision to take one step backwards to take two steps forward and revert to an older that worked but did not have a lot of the progress we had made earlier on. To make up for the lost time and efforts, we did not want to lose all of the code we were having trouble combining, so we decided to cut our losses and find another way to incorporate the previous work that had been causing issues earlier.

Overall, time was a big issue when it came to trying to take on this project. Especially when it came to figuring out how to merge everyone's work together. Just trying to accommodate for all of the version differences and specific technologies used, but we eventually worked quickly and worked hard to keep pushing onward and always stay innovative and make progress even when some issues seemed impossible to solve.

🥲Accomplishments that we're proud of

As first time LA Hacks participants and as freshmen, we are incredibly proud of the incredible progress we were able to make in a very short amount of time, proving to ourselves that with hard work, passion, and a clear vision, anything is possible. Our team did a fantastic job embracing the challenge of using technology unfamiliar to us, and stepped out of our comfort zones to bring our idea to life. Whether it was learning more about fetch.ai, or learning how to use flutter to develop mobile apps and the Gradle build process, we ended up building a robust application which far surpassed our initial expectations. One of our greatest successes was coordinating our work so that each function could be pieced together and emerge as a functional system. Let’s not overlook the success of not eating our hi-chews we were using for testing!

🤗What we learned

As we developed Farmunity, we came across different ways to push our boundaries and learn together as a team. For example, two of us came into the hackathon with experience using Flutter and Dart, while one teammate had comparatively less exposure to the library. We took this situation and made it a learning opportunity for everyone because we could leverage existing skills we’ve worked with all while coming across recent libraries and dependencies we could implement. Given that this was our very first hackathon outside of our respective colleges, it was really interesting to see how we adapted to new environments and learned to work with our surroundings thoroughly and develop the Farmunity App.