During August 2013 I took part in an event called Young Rewired State. This was my third year taking part in the event, but my first as a mentor.
I have blogged about Young Rewired State before on my old blog, but just in case you are unaware of what the event is here’s a brief description:
Young Rewired State is a week long event for Young coders (18 or under) based in the United Kingdom. The aim of the event is to get more young people coding and interacting with open government datasets.
Previously, the Cardiff Young Rewired State event had been held at Sequence, however this year it was held at Box UK.
This year I helped create an app called Growify (click for demo). Growify is an online based plant management tool which makes use of a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino, and some special hardware that we hacked together with the help of an electronics hobbyist from BT. The hardware was programmed using C and Python and made use of a Ruby backend REST API web server which our custom built hardware sent out http web requests to at specified intervals. The idea was that consumers could then plant our hardware into their plants / shrubs / crops and track particular information about the life of their plant. Some of the data that we managed to track included moisture, humidity, and temperature levels. Open data involving the weather and pollution zones were also implemented into the app to make it more complete and relevant to the Young Rewired State brief. All of this information could be visualised within an online dashboard in live time and a user could track further plants by adding them to their plants collection within their account.
Being an ex-gardner I saw some potential in Growify for those who are looking to grow their own plants but absolutely suck at it. Growify would be an excellent all in one budget solution for those that simply don’t have enough money for the specialist equipment which assists with growing plants. Unfortunately though, none of the members within the Growify team continued working on the app beyond the week because of distance restrictions. This is a real shame but nonetheless Growify was still an excellent idea.
Growify has since been made open source just in case you’d like to take a look at the code.
If you’d like to know more about my time at Young Rewired State, I wrote an in depth guest post for Box UK explaining what I had gained out of the week from volunteering as a mentor.
All in all, this year was a great year for Young Rewired State in Cardiff and I can’t wait to take part in the event again next year and see what other amazing ideas we can come up with.