Table of Contents

powerplant: GSOC 2018 Ideas List

Prospective students welcome!

Below you will find a list of the ideas that developers and mentors would like you to work on for GSOC 2018.

Index

Administration Interface

You can find this task #1162 on our PMS

Explanation

In general admins need to be able to easily modify the database. Also there should be a way for admins to easily add and edit crop and crop relationship data.

Aim of this project is to create such administration interface for the web UI with editors for all database document types.

Required skills

preferred experience with:

Expected results

roles field in user schema are defined with at least to different roles “admin” and “user”

Administration interface should be only available to “admin”s.

The advanced view should have a generic UI component for editing a list of documents independent from type

Every view should have a search feature for easy accessibility of all documents

The code should be covered with sufficient unit, integration tests and documentation

Code challenge

Mentor

Franz Gatzke


Design and Implement Weather API

You can find this task #1120 on our PMS

Explanation

Measure of heat accumulation is a common heuristic for predicting plant growth rates. Prediction of the harvest date (or planting date that corresponds to a given harvest date) of a particular crop is possible when temperature data from previous years, or even other locations, is augmented with dates of the crop's growth stages.

Weather forecasts can provide warnings of frost or rain.

Aim of this project is to collect weather data from external web services and implement algorithms for calculating heat accumulation, predicting crop growth stages, and providing weather warnings.

Web services that provide weather data:

Required skills

Expected results

Code challenge

Implement database model, low-level HTTP API, and low-level CLI commands for weather data.

Mentor

Petteri Pitkänen


Enhance the crop relationship model

You can find this task #1121 on our PMS

Explanation

Many plants form symbiotic relationships with other plants and organisms. The mechanisms by which two plants interact with each other are varied. They include:

Aim of this project is to go through scientific publications about plant relationships (companion plant, symbiosis), categorize the different interaction mechanisms, and improve our crop relationship model based on the gathered data.

References to scientific articles should also be stored in the database and linked to the corresponding crop relationship documents.

Required skills

Expected results

Code challenge

Add database model for references of scientific articles, linked with the crop relationship model. Make it possible to add references from the CLI.

Mentor

Petteri Pitkänen


Integrate parts of Plants for a Future (PFAF) database to powerplant

You can find this task #1305 on our PMS

Explanation

The Plants For A Future database is a permaculture-oriented database that contains information about over 7000 edible plants.

Aim of this project is to integrate parts of PFAF database by identifying data that has a functional purpose in powerplant, and then implementing algorithms and UI components that use this data.

Examples of PFAF data:

USDA hardiness zone is a classification of plants based on their capability of growing in a geographic location with specified average annual minimum temperature. Hardiness zone can be used to select plants that are capable of growing in a given geographic location.

Nitrogen fixation is the ability of a plant to fix atmospheric nitrogen to soil. By tracking the nitrogen fixers of a garden bed over years, it is possible to plan a crop rotation schedule where the accumulated nitrogen is used by nitrogen consumers during successive growing seasons.

Plant habit refers to a coarse type or shape of a plant. Habit can be used to (help) select plants that maximize the habitual diversity of a garden.

Required skills

Expected results

"USDA hardiness zone" integrated to powerplant

"Nitrogen fixation" integrated to powerplant

"Plant habit" integrated to powerplant

Code challenge

Identify another piece of data from PFAF database that is functional for powerplant, and plan, discuss and begin its implementation.

Mentors

Petteri Pitkänen,Franz Gatzke


Plant Processor

You can find this task #1326 on our PMS

Explanation

For planning the Crops in a beds we need a schedule that shows the period of time of a plant in a bed and the preparation work. The scheduler needs to show free space in a specific bed and time period to optimize the harvest per square meter. It should also take weather data into account and warn the user for example of frost. Additionally it should trigger task like expected harvest and expected care work of a bed/plants.

For having a predictive method for growing stages, warnings, tasks the student has to write a module which can trigger these different types

Required skills

preferred experience with:

Expected results

Code challenge

Mentor

Franz Gatzke


Scheduler Front end

You can find this task #1322 on our PMS

Explanation

For planning the Crops in a beds we need a schedule view that shows the period of time of a plant in a bed and the preparation work. The scheduler needs to show free space in a specific bed and time period to optimize the harvest per square meter. It should also take weather data into account and warn the user for example of frost. Additionally it should trigger task like expected harvest and expected care work of a bed/plants.

For this we need to create a view that looks like this for a Garden and a view that looks like thisfor a bed. This View needs to be developed and implement different interactions.

Required Skills

For Development of the frontend architecture the student needs to have a good knowledge of: JS ES6

and a basic knowledge of:

Expected Results

After the student finished implementing the schedule, it has to have a working frontend with following interactions:

Code challenge

Mentor

Franz Gatzke


Client-server communication infrastructure

You can find this task #1315 on our PMS

Explanation

Users should be able to use most powerplant features offline. For this purpose the clients need to cache user data and do calculations on the client machine.

Aim of this project is to define and implement the client-server communication infrastructure. This will be achieved by creating an object on the client side that communicates with the server, and separates data processing from the UI components. On the server side we have Processor, so let the name of this object be ClientProcessor.

When data on the server changes the clients need to synchronize. On the other hand, when the user has done changes offline and later goes online, the changes need to be pushed to the server for permanent storage. Part of this project is to create the update mechanism between ClientProcessor and Processor by which the clients synchronize with the server.

Required skills

Expected results

Code challenge

Refactor the system to cache crop and crop relationship data on the client, and do the related calculations on the client side instead of using HTTP requests to server.

Mentors

Petteri Pitkänen, Franz Gatzke


Project template

Do you have other ideas you would like to propose? Complete the template below and contact the Organization Administrators

Project title

Please make it simple and self explanatory.

Explanation

Describe the idea as specifically as possible.

Required skills

Describe skills required here

Expected results

Add here expected results

Code challenge

This will be assigned to the student once the project has been discussed and approved by the mentors. This is generally a short task for an interested student to demonstrate the capabilities with the used tools, e.g. deploying the web server and changing behaviour of feature Z.

Mentor/s

A mentor or mentors will be assigned to the student once the project has been discussed and approved by the mentors.