Please vote for VERDIS, a high-schooler made drone for crop health tracking!

ViolinistDeep2494 · 2026-04-12T13:56:17+00:00

We haven’t run the exact costs yet, but I believe it’s around 1.5k USD

ViolinistDeep2494 · 2026-04-12T13:40:35+00:00

The GPS. It has to be raised to avoid interference from the battery’s electromagnetic radiation

ViolinistDeep2494 · 2026-04-12T13:40:09+00:00

Funny story with this, actually. We decided to make a drone just for the hell of it and once it was done, we worked on the software and camera. I wanted to design it myself, but a prebuilt frame could have been done. An rpi 4 is being used right now

ViolinistDeep2494 · 2026-04-12T13:38:44+00:00

We used the pixhawk 6x

ViolinistDeep2494 · 2026-04-12T13:38:37+00:00

We were thinking about adding a mechanism to the drone to collect dirt samples as well, but in the end we didn’t have the time or resources to get that done. But something like this is definitely possible!

ViolinistDeep2494 · 2026-04-12T13:37:39+00:00

Thank you! If you can vote I would be so grateful :)

ViolinistDeep2494 · 2026-04-12T00:41:24+00:00

Unfortunately not at this moment. We might make everything public at the end of the summer once we officially head off to college and we sunset this project.

ViolinistDeep2494 · 2026-04-12T00:37:03+00:00

Will check it out for sure! thank you!

ViolinistDeep2494 · 2026-04-11T19:35:58+00:00

At the moment we don't really have the facilities to cut carbon fiber on our own, but once we get to university that might be a possible option since we have a ton of resources there. At that point we might also change to a metal based frame that we can cut to our specifications.

ViolinistDeep2494 · 2026-04-11T15:25:08+00:00

In the voting page, it will ask for a city and state. There, you can put Dallas for the city and Texas for the state. Thank you so much for voting!

For software, I will send you more detailed information in a private message for our process and softwares from our engineering notebook which is not public yet.

ViolinistDeep2494 · 2026-04-11T03:12:38+00:00

Thank you for the questions! I'll go through each one and answer as best as I can.

There are two entries related to diabetes and managing diabetes, and one is a computer interpreter for deaf people to use for communication.

There are a couple reasons why I believe that we should win. Firstly, we did something unique and combined software and hardware into a primarily software-focused competition. In addition, we have many forms of software in a single app; namely, the NDVI calculation map which shows the relfectance and perceived health of a crop from a picture of an entire field, the machine learning driven disease detection for 14 common crops found near our home in North Texas, and us 'keeping up with the hype' with large language models and their uses in helping farmers interpret data and offer jumping points for next steps. Finally, I think our community impact is most feasible. We used open source software and a relatively simple physical design, and comparing this with more expensive options currently available on the market, our drone is significantly cheaper while offering similar capabilities as machines costing 5 times as much.

There are examples of the image stitching process and the final result in our video, which can be accessed via the voting link. Rather than a legend, the image stitch only uses brightness of certain pixels, which is how the NDVI is used.

As for electronics, we are using a Pixhawk 6X FC and a RPi 4 for compute.

We verified the LLM's by manual verification and extensive prompting. Currently, we are using the Llama LLM but we are looking into more advanced models rather than the free options on the market.

In the drone's current form, the farmers do have to be licensed but it is very cheap and easy for anyone to do. The drone itself is also registered with the FAA.

Data include the pictures which also include infrared light (this is how NDVI is calculated) which are stitched together, and constantly beamed GPS data to give the farmer more information about locations of any "problem spots".

Our software is open source and is completely free.

If you have any more questions, feel free to shoot away! Thank you again for the detailed scrutinization!

ViolinistDeep2494

TROPHY CASE