GreenHouse: Streamlining Gardening Efforts for Increased Yields

The Solution

By leveraging the capabilities of the Android platform, our team built a tablet app that helps horticulturalists monitor and observe their greenhouses on a daily basis from anywhere, anytime. Thanks to this solution, our partner team is now able to provide its clients with a highly responsive and intuitive greenhouse management software that releases them from the need to be regularly on-site in the greenhouse in order to detect the existing or newly arising issues. Moreover, the app works offline, thus releasing its users from having to handle the complex issue of having high-quality internet connection inside a greenhouse.

With this new tool, nothing goes unnoticed or discovered too late, for that matter - the clients get daily reports on the state of their greenhouses as well as on the plants, vegetables, and fruits in need of constant care and attention.

Some of the main functionalities of the tablet app are as follows: 

• The greenhouse management software uses a Wi-Fi manager to establish a connection with a specific network aimed at greenhouse management. This network provides a controlled and secure environment for seamless communication between the tablet and the greenhouse. 
• There is a QR code scanning technology incorporated into the app which can retrieve essential information about the greenhouse. By scanning a specific QR code associated with the greenhouse, the tool instantly captures and extracts relevant data, thus providing users with comprehensive insights. Additionally, the app uses a local database which ensures seamless data access and the offline functionality. The database serves as a secure storage repository for all the information obtained from the QR code scan. It efficiently stores important greenhouse data, such as plant details, environmental parameters, and other relevant information. 
• The app also comes with a smart update mechanism to ensure that the users have the latest version of the app at all times. By leveraging specific information obtained from the greenhouse, the app proactively evaluates predefined criteria to determine if an update is necessary. This approach eliminates the need for manual checks and keeps users informed about the availability of new features, enhancements, and improvements.

How It Works

A quick overview of the greenhouse management software structure that our team created for our client:

1. There is a client data management service for each greenhouse. It is a custom hardware module with its own custom software which provides APIs through the local Wi-Fi connection to the tablet app from one end, and from the other end it is connected to the internet to provide and sync data to a centralized backend. Thus, this client data management service acts as a decentralized backend for each greenhouse (or a cluster of greenhouses). It also acts as a gateway to provide communication between the centralized backend and the web portal from one end and to the greenhouse workers using the tablet app from the other end.
2. The tablet app gets the necessary information from this service for each greenhouse, processes it, lets the user make changes and modifications as per their needs, and then sends it back to the service. 
3. Then there is the back-end portal which also receives information from each service, filters it, and sends it to the front-end portal to display. 
4. Lastly, after the needed changes are made on the front-end portal, the data goes back via the back end (processing and filtering applied if needed) to the client data management service.