HopeSeed: A look into the future that I am a part of.
MVP for CH13 capstone project in Holberton School.
HopeSeed is composed of
A mobile application and a low-cost, replicable, open-source and functional image acquisition instrument. It allows the counting and unlike others measurement and color identification processes for any type of seed in a controlled environment. With the recollected data we pretend to analyze in the next step of the project, the relationship between seed phenotypes and germination potential in different climatic conditions. (Go to the end of this blog to understand why hopeseed goes one step further)
The Work Team
This powerful team is working to make it just a matter of time to find the right seeds for the hostile environments that climate change will bring by examining pulse crops (lentil, pea, and chickpea seeds). As our engineering problem, we wanted to find a way from a low-cost environment and using any smartphone, to be able to perform a phenotypic analysis of a group of seeds.
To achieve our goal we decided to implement the following set of technologies.
Front-end:
- React: It is a JavaScript library to build user interfaces from the creation of encapsulated components with states. It was chosen for its wide community and ease to build a beautiful, functional, responsive, and robust website thanks to its different tools.
- Flutter: It is a dart framework that allows to development of Android and IOS mobile applications by creating widgets inside other widgets. This framework was selected for its transpiler by allowing us to reduce the learning curve.
Back-end:
- OpenCV/Tesseract OCR/Tensorflow: A set of libraries related to image analysis implemented.
- Flask: Framework selected for building the API because of our previous mastery.
Data management:
- Digital Ocean spaces: It is an object storage service with its API for easy manipulation of information. Its selection criteria were based on an immovable decision.
- Auth0: IaaS (Identity as a service) used for authentication and manipulation of user accounts in the mobile application.
DevOps:
- DockerEngine: It is an open-source containerization software that allows you to control several containers on a single server by making use of the different access ports. The project is supported on two main images with NGINX and an ANACONDA environment for the web page and API.
The information flow starts with a mobile device taking a picture in an established environment, the image travels to our server which is in charge of processing it, storing the results, and returning them to the app to be visualized by the user as illustrated superficially in the image below:
Completed the processing without calibration, collection, and visualization of the information.
The development of an informative and documentary web page was completed.
The development of the mobile application with authentication for the end-user was completed.
The biggest challenge
Everything here has been a challenge of learning, facing problems, and looking for solutions. Personally, my biggest challenge was adapting to the way of developing mobile devices. Calling widgets inside other widgets that call other widgets confused me a bit. Of course, this triggers other logic issues which fell mainly on logging in during auth0 authentication and naturally displaying the results.
The language, although I had never used it before, was not a major problem for me. This was my first approach to dart and I think I liked it.
¿Why I chose this project?
I chose to collaborate for HopeSeed because I had been working for some time with a colleague to build our project idea as a plan b in case no company managed to captivate our attention.
It was clear to us that we wanted to participate where there was a relationship with algorithms, artificial intelligence, or deep learning to start soaking in this world. Additionally, we wanted something that could be of great help to people.
And now that I think about it clearly, hopeseed paints the whole picture. It all started with a presentation of a long-term idea that intended to analyze pulse crops but to be part of the working group you had to pass a technical test with new technologies for everyone in 3 days. I like it when things are a challenge, this one was and we won it.
After this, we learned more in detail about the project and the long-term impact it could generate, which in the best case, could contribute to growing food in places never before considered that in turn would nourish the land where they germinate thanks to an app.
About climate change
It is necessary to talk a little about the causes of climate change which has had observable effects on the environment. The most obvious at first sight is the loss of sea ice, accelerated sea-level rise, and longer and more intense heat waves.
This progressive decline is mainly due to the increase of Carbon Dioxide CO2 (increased by 48% since the industrial revolution began) by natural processes and human activity (deforestation, fuel burning, etc.), the production of methane derived from waste decomposition in landfills, agriculture (especially rice cultivation), manure management and digestion of ruminants (comprising 14.5% of all anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases).
I invite you to delve deeper into this article from which I have taken statistics, related to the causes of climate change.
At HopeSeed we believe in pulse crops as the seeds of the future. Those that can replace/reduce animal meat consumption, nourish soils, bring food to harsh climate zones and grow under zero gravity.
So why not bring pulse crops on the next Falcon.
About me
I consider myself a collaborative person eager to learn about myself and others, self-taught and reflective. Since I was a child, I have liked electricity, so I went first to electronics, where I developed my curiosity, some skills, and my taste for programming. I started by automating some simple processes in c language for microcontrollers where I greatly improved my self-learning ability and discipline. I have participated in different projects and competitions related to mechatronic design and development, I have made two publications in engineering magazines and developed a completely commercial IoT device.
