INDUSTRY: INDOOR GARDENING
Canadian company Plantaform created the first smart indoor garden that utilizes fog to create a nutrient-rich environment to grow healthy plants quickly! This technology was developed by NASA to grow plants in space. It allows the device to consume much less water than traditional indoor gardening methods. The product became extremely popular in the US and Canada due to its functionality and unique design!
As a startup, Plantaform had limited resources, and one of the main challenges was that their team had embedded experience but didn’t have software experience.
The Plantaform team was initially using Blynk for R&D purposes. As they started moving forward, they developed a more complex solution with Blynk. Plantaform team realized that on Blynk they can create an app and customize the UI to reach the desired result without any coding. They decided to go White Label and launch their apps on App Store and Google Play to bring the user experience to the next level.
Plantaform developed a solution to control lighting and cleaning procedure, monitor water levels, plant progress, and other processes packed in a stylish mobile app.
Among their key goals were:
Hardware: ESP32
Connectivity: WiFi
Andres, CTO of Plantaform, shared that they chose Blynk because it's the only platform that offers a complete set of tools needed to build and launch an IoT product, and most of the features are built-in.
Here's the short demo of the Plantaform app that the team kindly shared with us. It walks us through the end-user experience - from the very first device activation to navigating through all the functionality.
We asked Andres what Blynk’s features are the most valuable for their business:
“The first would be WiFi device provisioning. It was extremely helpful for adding multiple devices and new users to the application. The second is having multi-tenancy and IoT device management tools to see all connected devices as an admin and be able to assign them to different users. Also, the firmware API that Blynk offers was solid and easy to use, so we were able to develop quickly. Lastly, it's an ability to make changes to the templates and having those changes go right away to all of the different applications or all the people that use the same template.”
All of the above was done with the support of Blynk’s dedicated launch engineer.
Learn about Plantaform's experience of choosing hardware and IoT platform for their product, challenges and lessons they learned along the way, and other exciting details in our video interview with Andres Torres!
Andres Torres, CTO at Plantaform
Blynk offers a solution that requires very little or almost no code to build an IoT application. This allowed us to quickly develop a solution with the experience and tools we had in-house without hiring an external software engineering team.
