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Hackathon 24 - Hamburg

Team 18 – Improve your home with a smart plant environment

Introduction

This September, we participated in a local hackathon with the goal of contributing to science and society by tackling different topics and developing innovative solutions for existing or emerging problems. We were presented with three problem cases to choose from and decided to focus on the Smart Home challenge. Specifically, we aimed to create a solution that minimizes the environmental footprint of our living spaces in day-to-day life.

We? That’s Kai, Dusan, and Sebastian—three students at ITECH Hamburg, currently in the second year of our three-year apprenticeship to become software engineers.

Project Description

When thinking about living not only in the future but also today, we are facing a tremendous problem: space! With more and more people inhabiting the planet, living space is becoming increasingly rare and valuable. Cities expand by the day, which leads to less room for nature and its flora and fauna. While we won’t be solving overpopulation with this project, thinking about it revealed significant potential for integrating natural resources into our homes.

Imagine going to the supermarket and coming back with a product that allows you to integrate different modules into your home. Modules like solar panels, water collection tanks, systems for collecting and filtering used water, insulation facades with plants, and automatic watering systems are just a few of the possibilities.

Let’s take a quick, deep dive into the facades, for example. Imagine having plants growing on the walls of your room. Besides the obvious benefit of cleaner air and a more aesthetically pleasing home, plants are known for their excellent insulating properties, which can reduce heating and cooling costs overall. When designing new homes, alternative, recyclable materials like wood fiber can be used for insulation. When combined with plant-covered facades, they offer efficient insulation while conserving resources. You could even grow edible plants, like berries or other fruits, further reducing food costs and dependency. Psychologically, this would also be hugely beneficial, as humans naturally crave a connection to nature. Being surrounded by it has proven advantages for our well-being.

Each of these modules can be integrated into a semi-automated software system that manages the devices, all connected via a simple dashboard app. Data from weather forecasts, for example, can be used to calculate how much energy and water your modules will produce or collect, allowing for automatic watering in a self-sustaining cycle. Based on indoor temperature and climate conditions, the system will calculate the optimal amount of water needed to keep the plants thriving. Additionally, the app can estimate how much extra electricity is required for the week or whether you might be able to sell surplus electricity generated by your solar panels back to the grid.

The client can start with one or two modules, such as the natural facades, and water them manually at first. Over time, they can add more individual modules, gradually transforming their home into a more climate-friendly and efficient solution for the future. Each added module will increase both the complexity and the benefits of the overall “smart home cycle,” all of which can be easily managed and monitored through the user-friendly software.

Our product not only reduces the initial costs of creating a smart home, making it more accessible, but also offers a flexible, modular approach that is perfectly tailored to the needs of each client.

Target Group

Even though our product could benefit almost everyone on the planet, we believe that the main target audience is high-density areas, such as big cities and suburban regions. City living is often very disconnected from nature, and air pollution tends to be much higher, making the impact of our product even more significant in these environments. This is why we made urban areas our primary focus.

As we all know, living in cities is expensive, and many people are trying to make ends meet, save money, and may not be open to expensive smart home solutions that cost tens of thousands of euros upfront. This is where our modular approach becomes extremely useful, as it reduces the initial cost to a minimum, making it much more accessible to the average person.

Once the first module is installed, users start saving money, which they can actively track on their dashboard. This saved money can then be reinvested in the next module, creating a chain reaction that gradually transforms their home into a smart and climate-neutral environment, step by step.

Our Approach

We started our project by brainstorming what a futuristic home might look like and how we could reconnect humans with nature while addressing some of the climate challenges we face today. Early in our brainstorming process, we realized that the ideal solution would be to find a way to redesign people’s homes—not just focusing on newly built structures but also offering the opportunity to retrofit existing ones. We considered some major issues and worked to identify their root causes, which we then aimed to address.

As you can see, one of the main root causes is the “lack of green spaces.” It would be amazing if plants could grow on walls. Well, what if they could? Initially, we thought about having plants grow directly on walls, but we quickly realized this wouldn’t work for people who rent their homes. That’s how the idea of extra-mountable facades was born. This became the core feature of our project phase and the main module of our final product. However, we understood that simply having plants on facades wouldn’t make a home “smart.” We needed integrated systems and technologies to ensure it blended seamlessly with modern life.

So, how do you make plants smart? By watering them automatically without using additional electricity. By incorporating optional modules for solar panels and water collection systems, we could create a fully self-sustaining system.

In our opinion, the best way for users to interact with this system was through software that displays metrics, allows individual modules to be activated or deactivated, and provides an estimate of how much energy and resources have been saved thanks to the installed modules.

Looking to the future, many new features could be integrated into the system, naturally evolving it into a product capable of managing and monitoring various aspects of modern life. There’s even potential for collaborations with third-party developers, where our software solution could serve as a hub for different modules and plugins to be built around it—similar to how modern computer hardware ecosystems work.

The Prototype

For our prototype, we developed a dashboard as the core software solution. It displays the most important metrics for each individual module, as well as the weather forecast for the upcoming week. The dashboard shows the water level in the collection tanks and tracks how much water has already been used. One of the key metrics is the predicted water usage, which helps the client determine whether additional water will need to be purchased.

Similarly, metrics for the solar panels provide the client with an estimate of how self-sustaining their home is based on current weather conditions. The client can also monitor their progress throughout the year and see how much money has been saved by implementing the modules.