Rutabaga

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  Rutabaga Title Page

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  Rutabaga Menu

Inspiration

We were inspired by a love for gardening, and wanting to do something to impact climate change in positive way. Keeping a diverse garden full of native plants can help to reduce impact of climate change. Given our enrollment at Michigan State University, a college founded as the first agricultural college in the United States, we believed that this idea would be a great blend, mixing MSU's agricultural roots with the innovations of computer science.

What it does

This is a webpage that allows users to access a readily expanding datapace of various garden plants and crops. This database has information on each crop, such as what climate zones the crop is best grown in, how much water the plant should be watered with, and more. The user can pick which crops they would like to plant, and our website loads a visualization of their potential garden with all of the various plants that could be in it.

How we built it

We used Node.js for the front end. On the backend we used MongoDB atlas to store data about all of the plants. We also used Python and MATLAB on the backend to create the garden plots.

Challenges we ran into

We encountered quite a few challenges when trying to connect MATLAB to our Node.js website. MATLAB was used to create the garden plots, and we needed to pass data from the data base through the JavaScript to the python code used to create the plots. In the end we managed to get everything working, though it was initially a struggle as we didn't have much experience in this area.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of both the list of plants pulled from the database, and the customizable garden plot that is generated after the user selects what they want in their garden.

What we learned

We learned a lot about connecting noSQL databases to Node.js, and about connecting python to Node.js. We didn't have much experience in any of this when we started, so it was a lot of experimenting and learning as we went. We are however, very happy with the results.

What's next for Rutabaga

Rutabaga can easily be scaled by increasing it's database to including as many different plant specifies as the user wants. More information about each of the plants can also be stored

Built With

• css
• flask
• html
• javascript
• matlab
• mongodb
• node.js