GDG Basilicata Builds Live Smart Greenhouse at Forest Tech Conference

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GDG Basilicata held the third edition of DevFest, rebranded as DevForest, bringing 66 developers to La Majonica forest in Tito, Italy. Rather than following a standard conference format, the event centered on a single shared goal: building a fully functional smart greenhouse over the course of one day. Five teams worked across disciplines including IoT, 3D printing, cloud computing, botany, and generative AI, with morning talks serving as technical contracts that defined the specifications each team had to meet. The final system connected an ESP32 microcontroller to a Spring Boot API gateway on Cloud Run, a Firestore database, and an Angular dashboard powered by Google Gemini. Limited forest connectivity ruled out a cloud-push model, so the team adapted to a polling architecture and successfully delivered a working, interdependent pipeline by day's end.

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