powerplant:development_log

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Companion Planting Development Log

Garden Planner A non-open source, paid desktop/iOS app for hand-designing a garden and planning your crops. Has a very nice looking calendar.

List of companion plants Wikipedia's list of companion plants. Quite comprehensive, covers some things not in the database yet. Even if you don't want to trust a wikipedia article, it still has links to 50+ useful sources.

Companion Plant Spacing Research done by Kentucky State University on the spacing of intermixed companion plants in a hexagonal formation. The gist is that the spacing is a weighted average of the recommended spacing of the two crops based on the proportions of the crops.

Paper by M.K. Bomford Further development on the KYSU research above. Has a few key conclusions, including:

  • Results suggest that mixed planting can increase land-use efficiency of BIA systems under resource-limiting conditions.
  • Cool-season crops should not be mixed with warm-season crops for synchronous growth in mixed plantings.

Crop Planning Open-source Java program to plan crops. Not too well-designed or easily usable. Does not appear to have any data on time until harvest, or take conditions into account, or include any companion crop information. However, it's open-source, so it could theoretically be expanded. At first glance it does not seem like a great base upon which to expand.

Another Crop Planner Also open-source, this time a single page application. Angular front, Spring framework Java back end. Claims to offer advice on companion planting, harvesting dates! No longer hosted online, and I haven't yet tried hosting locally, but it is definitely worth checking out if it does indeed do what it claims to. A single page application could be a good format for the companion planner due to its cross-platform compatibility. Also has 970 commits by a single person so a lot of work has gone into it. Also means it's very complex, so more time spent learning someone else's code/system.

Yet Another Crop Planner Open-source planting calendar, this time using Meteor.js. Much more simple, but maybe this means easier to build upon. No companion features but they could be created. Have not tested yet either.

Software Requirement Specification for Companion Planner Version 0.1

Document Purpose TO DO: Identify the product whose software requirements are specified, including the revision or release number. Describe the scope of the product.

Users

Gardeners

Goal

Help with garden planning using companion plants to deter pests, improve the harvest and add variety ie more diversity.

Taking into account:

  • Soil type
  • Climate
  • Growth time
  • Sun and water requirements

Improve harvest and diversity by adding valuable information during the planning stage.

TO DO: Provide a short description of the software being specified and its purpose, including relevant benefits, objectives, and goals.

Software description

Convert data on crops into something usable by anyone interested in gardening.

Open-source

Objectives

Improve planning process for anyone who wants to use permaculture principles in their gardening.

Save time during planning process “” “”

Education of users

Improve and collect data

Product Perspective

Users

Anyone who wants to plan a garden.

People who want to use open source software.

Outcome

A year of use of this software will result in:

Users adding to data from all over the world (different climates, soil types)

maybe need more added here

TO DO: Describe the context and origin of the product being specified. Include a simple diagram that shows the major components of the overall system, subsystem interconnections, and external interface.

Context

The information that we provide is all out there, we want to provide a central source for all of it.

Origin

Permaculture guidelines, gardening best practices. Permaculture ideals: Take of earth, regenerate soil.

Permaculture ideals:

  • Care for earth
  • Care for people
  • Fair share

TO DO: 1. Summarize the major functions that the product must perform or must let the user perform.

  • Need a list of available plants
  • Need to be able to see compatible/incompatible plants
  • Need to be able to filter by multiple plants
  • Need to filter by attribute(s)
    • Include: Soil conditions, grow time, climate, sun direction relative to each bed, labor required for each plant, sun+water required, best season/time to plant
  • Find optimal planting schedule for a set of plants
  • Schedule must also include greenhouse, maybe types of beds
  • Find optimal planting combinations for any number of plants per bed
    • Based on distance between plants
  • Have some visualization of garden beds w/plants
  • Draw in current crops
  • Fill in blank spaces in beds
  • Filter crops added by algorithm based on preference
  • Add/remove crops for any reason
  • Deny/change crops selected by algorithm for any reason
  • Save user profiles with all information
  • Save past combinations
  • Keep track of nitrogen fixers/consumers in each bed over time
  • Take user feedback
  • Sharing/collaboration between users

2. Organize the functions to make them understandable to any reader.

Aimee says: Urgent: Good combinations for current month

Less Urgent: Planting location

Not urgent: Visualizing beds

3. Provide a Data Flow Diagram of the system to show how these functions relate to each other.

will create later

TO DO: 1. Identify the various users that you anticipate will use this product.

  • Hobbyist - small home garden. 20 m2
  • Countryside garden - 250 - 1000 m2
  • Organic farmer - 1000 m2 +

2. Describe the pertinent characteristics of each user.

  • Hobbyist - Not too much labor is better,
  • Countryside garden - Wants to be self-sufficient.
  • Organic farmer - Prioritizing lower labor. Intermixed plants means more labor. Technologically literate, want to use software to improve their yields

TO DO: Describe the environment in which the software will operate, including the hardware platform, operating system and versions, and any other software components or applications with which it must peacefully coexist. In this part, make sure to include a simple diagram that shows the major components of the overall system, subsystem interconnections, and external interface

Lower range laptop

Windows 10, Chrome, use in office or garden

Android x.x.x, Chrome, use in office or garden, but mainly garden

TO DO: Describe any items or issues that will limit the options available to the developers. These might include:

  • hardware limitations (timing requirements, memory requirements)
  • interfaces to other applications
  • specific technologies
  • tools
  • databases to be used
  • language requirements
  • User Documentation
  • Need to have user documentation. Usability will be severly limited without. Need to have in depth descriptions of how to input data, what

screen should look like, how to interpret output. Need to document things before creating them.

  • Need to use vanilla Javascript for front end.
  • Plain HTML, LESS for css
  • Need eventually be compatible with FarmOS.
  • Have to use FarmOS database.
  • Text + photo editors.
  • Back end: PHP to deal with database, Javascript to process business logic

TO DO: Describe what kind of manuals and what kind of help is needed for the software you will be developing. List the user documentation components (such as user manuals, on-line help, and tutorials) that will be delivered along with the software.

  • User manual
  • FAQ
  • First time user prompts
  • Community talking points
  • Chat rooms (FarmOS)
  • Tutorials for most exemplary tasks

External Interface Requirements, User Interfaces

TO DO: Describe user interfaces, different screen images, any GUI standards, standard buttons and functions (e.g., Cancel) that will be available to the user. Define error message display standards.

come back to this

Hardware Interfaces

TO DO: Describe the logical and physical characteristics of each interface between the software product and the hardware components of the system. This may include: * the supported device types, * the nature of the data and control interactions between the software and the hardware.

  • 800×400 display
  • 100kB/s
  • 200mb memory on mobile
  • 512mb memory on non-mobile
  • 5mb local storage

Software Interfaces

TO DO: 1. Describe: the connections between the product and other specific software components (name and version), databases, operating systems (Windows? Linux? Etc.), tools, libraries and integrated commercial components.

  • FarmOS

2. Identify data items or messages coming into the system and going out and describe the purpose of each.

FarmOS specs go here

3. Describe the services needed.

also later

4. Identify data that will be shared across software components.

need to look at what FarmOS stores and what we store figure out what we can store in FarmOS

Communications Interfaces

TO DO: 1. Describethe requirements associated with any communications functions required by this product, including e-mail, web browser, network server communications protocols, electronic forms.

define standards for communication w/FarmOS

2. Define any pertinent message formatting.

more details w FarmOS

3. Identify any communication standards that will be used, such as FTP or HTTP.

  • HTTP (REST, JSON)

4. Specify any communication security or encryption issues, data transfer rates, and synchronization mechanisms.

  • Profile could have sensitive info
  • Even in case of illegal crops being grown, info cannot be accessible by anyone
  • Yield is sensitive
  • Complete transparency within network of gardeners, zero transparency outside

Use Case View

TO DO: Provide a use case diagram which will encapsulate the entire system and all possible actors.

will do later

  1. Complete the specifications
    1. Completing function list
    2. Decide zthe software stack
    3. MoSCoW (Must have, should have, could have)
  2. Research interfaces with FarmOS

Github: … (to be filled)

  • powerplant/development_log.1496780731.txt.gz
  • Last modified: 2017/06/06 22:25
  • by ecohack