piLapse

gallery view which gets updated automatically when a picture is taken.
the home page

Inspiration

Amazon wildfires this year inspired us to save our natural forests from decimation

What it does

Recognizes if there is deforestation or wildfires going on in a forest using real time Visual Recognition and sends text alerts to relevant parties so that quick action can be taken

How we built it

Used a Raspberry-Pi to automate taking static pictures from a digital camera and upload it in the IBM cloud, in addition to concurrently running Visual Recognition AI from IBM Watson to detect wildfires or deforestation and send instant text alerts using twilio API

Challenges we ran into

i. First time working with hardware such as Raspberry Pi ii. First time working with SSH and networking protocols iii. Lack of knowledge working in a restricted public network iv. First time working with IBM Cloud and IBM Watson Visual Recognition AI v. Lack of answers on the internet or stackoverflow

Accomplishments that we're proud of

i. Getting hardware and software working smoothly within 3 days of hacking ii. Getting real time view and feedback from Watson AI iii. Realizing that our project has real world applications and has the potential to save the environment

What we learned

i. Teamwork ii. Learning to trust one another when things look bleak and there's errors everywhere in the code iii. Building on each other's skill sets and compensating for teammate's weaknesses