FireIQ

Inspiration

Forest fires have become more intense over the years, the best way to fight them is containment, so having a device setting a perimeter to monitor the fir is crucial for putting it out

What it does

The device is design to be dropped from firefighter helicopters while fighting wildfires. Once on the ground, it monitors the environment for humidity, temperature, air contaminants, and flame presence. It is designed to act like a perimeter that monitors the growth of the wildfire, which allows for personnel to spend more time fighting the fire.

How we built it

We chose to make the model like a spike so that energy is dispersed into the ground rather than into the electrical components. It is also shaped in such a way that the bottom face almost never faces the ground, so we decided to populate that area with sensors.

Challenges we ran into

One of our challenges was deciding on our idea. Our idea went from a wearable for Search and Rescue operatives, to something geared more for firefighters, until eventually we settled on our current iteration. Our biggest hurdle was was getting our ESP32's to transmit data. We wanted to use the RF transceivers but we couldn't get the to work, so we opted to use the built in ESPnow that essentially does the same thing through WiFi. We also came into a lot of issues when making our CAD, as the queues to print were very full.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of the things we were most proud of was getting the ESP's to successfully communicate with each other. It felt really good to see our device transmitting live data to our app.

What we learned

Teamwork was extremely crucial in this competition. Each of us had a task we sought out to do. Our ability to divide and conquer our task was what let us finish in time.

What's next for FireIQ

Unfortunately, we were not able to implement a lot of good features due to time constraints. One such feature was the ability to detect the risk of blowup. Blowup is when there is extremely dry air, high temperature, and an excessive amount of air contaminants. this combination causes the bonds between the molecules of the air contaminants to break, causing a large combustion. This happens often in wildfires. Another thing we wanted to implement was a map that tracks the distance of each device to each other, but we did not have enough time.