SpotLight – CSE Senior Design

Team Name

Gardeners of the Galaxy

Team Logo

Timeline

Fall 2020 – Spring 2021

Students

Hoang Luu
Israel Tshitenge
Jenny Nguyen
Mapu Pham
Rasik Kaiser

Sponsor

Tyler Harris

Abstract

SpotLight is an iOS and Android compatible mobile application that is used to help users know what plants are good to be planted in their given location. SpotLight will use the user’s location to apply the sun path on the app. Then, the user will capture images of the skyline so that the app can generate the sunshade/sun intensity graph. The goal of the SpotLight is to output a list of recommended plants to the user and save the user’s time from having to do their own research.

Background

Ever since COVID-19 occurred, many people stayed home without anything to do. Some people may have started to garden because it gave them a peace of mind in the middle of the pandemic. Since not all plant lovers are experienced in planting, some may have watched other gardeners grow plants on the Internet without knowing how hard it is to maintain the plants.

Beginners may want to start growing a garden but do not know which plants will best fit the environment of their location. There are many resources online that can guide them. However, some resources may not completely have a list of recommendations specific to the plant lovers.

Thus, a mobile application called SpotLight will be developed to tell users which plants are best to be planted in their environment based on their location, the amount of sunlight/sunshade, and the sun’s intensity.

Project Requirements

SpotLight shall utilize React Native Expo to be cross-platform among iOS and Android devices.
SpotLight shall implement Google’s Firebase as the backend for the mobile application.
SpotLight shall allow users to log in and sign up when the application is launched.
SpotLight shall allow the GUI to let the user navigate to different tabs such as the home page, camera, and sun location detection.
SpotLight shall allow the user to take a compilation of images using the camera and save it onto Firebase.
SpotLight shall analyze the images taken by the user and generate a panorama.
SpotLight shall determine the sun’s location based on the user’s location.
SpotLight shall determine the sun’s intensity based on the sun’s location.
SpotLight shall generate the sun path on the generated panorama image.
SpotLight shall generate the sunshade graph of the sun throughout the year.

System Overview

The application will implement 360 degree photography and have similar functionality to the application SkyView. The mobile device’s components will help to determine the location of the device and the direction the device is pointing towards, which include:
• Global Positioning System (GPS)
• Inertial measurement unit (IMU)
• Camera
The application will observe tree coverage and detect the sun to determine how much sunlight is accumulated in a given area, and give suggestions on which plants can be grown here. We will implement Application Programming Interfaces (API) in this program to give a range of functionality for the mobile application, which include but are not limited to:
• Firebase
The team will put to use various data sets, which provide the history of the weather in specific locations, images of the sky, and the hardiness zone in the area.

Results

Demo Video Link

Panorama Example

Future Work

There are a few tasks that were not able to be done due to time restrictions:

Save and retrieve the images captured into/from Firebase.
Generate the full sunshade graph using the sun’s intensity (Only the sun with no intensity has been calculated so far).