About my Project
My capstone project is an application for Century Farms that displays historic and current farm data and historic and future climate data for each farm. The end product will have a map on the main screen with clickable markers that show more information about the farm. This information will include historic farm data, current farm data, and climate graphs from the year 1920 to 2050. This project was started last year by capstone students. The major features my teammate and I are working on is creating a database for all of the data, expanding the current climate graphs (that have very limited years) to the years 1920-1950, creating a timelapse mode on the map, and adding more search features.
My Role
My main responsibilities have been creating the database, making a frontend that interacts with the database, and expanding the climate graphs to include more years of data. I have also worked on smaller tasks like making tabs for the individual farm page instead of having all of the information on one page.
I currently have the database, front end interacting with the database, and the tabs done. I am currently working on getting the climate graphs expanded. I have all of the data organized and ready to be used. My next step is coding the graphs, which looks easier than I thought it would be! There will be four climate graphs. One climate graph will be for historic temperature data from the year 1920 to 2021. The second graph will be for historic precipitation data from the year 1920 to 2021. The third graph will be future projected temperature data from the year 2022 (ClimateNA, the source I’m using, doesn’t have actual data for 2022 yet) to 2050. The last graph will be future projected precipitation data from the year 2022 to 2050.
Additionally, there are a couple things my teammate and I plan on working together on. These include expanding the search functionality and adding pictures for all of the farms.
Difficulties
One difficulty that set us back throughout the term was not being able to get the map API to work. We had to switch map APIs because we needed more features available to us to be able to implement the timelapse mode. After many weeks passing of this not working, our professor advised us to switch to a web application instead of a mobile application because React can be easier to work with than React Native, which was used for the mobile app. After getting an ok from our project sponsor to switch to a web app, we decided to go this route. Now, the map is displayed and has markers for all of the farms.
Another difficulty we had was getting the database that’s hosted on MongoDB to interact with our code. I tried many tutorials for this and a lot of them did not work. I finally found one that did work and was able to get API endpoints set up to query the tables in the database.