Inspiration

In recent years, Corpus Christi and the Texas Gulf Coast have faced frequent flooding and storm events, often with limited localized data. We wanted to build an affordable, deployable solution that empowers communities to monitor their own environments in real time.

What It Does

The Local Deployable Disaster Alert System (LDDAS) collects temperature, humidity, light, and water-level data through interconnected ESP32-based sensor nodes. These readings are transmitted to a central gateway, stored in a local database, and analyzed with an AI model that predicts short-term flood risk. Users can view live graphs, sensor readings, and alerts through a web dashboard.

How We Built It

We combined embedded systems, FastAPI, SQLite, and a simple machine learning model for local nowcasting. Real-time serial data from our ESP32 network feeds into the backend, where alerts are generated and displayed through an interactive frontend built in JavaScript.

Challenges

Our biggest challenges included fine-tuning the ultrasonic sensor for accurate water-level readings and maintaining reliable wireless communication between sensor nodes. Integrating real hardware data with the backend while keeping the system stable under live updates also took extensive debugging.

Accomplishments

We successfully created a fully working IoT weather station network with real-time visualization, accurate data collection, and an AI-driven alert system—all deployable from a single laptop.

What We Learned

We learned how to integrate hardware, software, and AI into one cohesive system, and how vital data accessibility is for community-based disaster preparedness.

What’s Next

Our next step is to scale the network city-wide—deploying multiple sensor nodes across Corpus Christi to form a low-cost, resilient flood-detection grid.

Built With

• asyncio)-javascript
• backend
• built-with:-python-(fastapi
• css-(frontend-dashboard)-esp32-(c++/arduino)-machine-learning-(ai-nowcasting-model)-serial-communication-&-esp-now-(wireless-data-transmission)-matplotlib-&-chart.js-(real-time-data-visualization)-dotenv
• html
• pandas
• sqlalchemy
• sqlite
• uvicorn