What Inspired Me Growing up in Coimbatore — the Manchester of South India — factories and motors are not textbook concepts. They are the sound of the city. Every street has a workshop. Every workshop runs on motors. During a visit to a relative's small manufacturing unit, I witnessed something that stayed with me. A motor failed without a single warning sign. Production stopped for 4 days. Repair cost ₹2.5 lakhs. Workers sat idle. Orders were delayed. The owner said something that became the seed of SENTINEL — "If only someone had told me it was going to fail." I researched further and discovered that 80% of industrial motor failures give zero warning signs and existing enterprise solutions cost ₹10–50 lakhs — completely out of reach for the factories that need them most. That one visit. That one sentence. That is why I am building SENTINEL.
What I Plan to Learn SENTINEL is my proposed solution — a Predictive Machine Intelligence System currently being developed as a first year ECE student at SNS College of Technology, Coimbatore. Through building SENTINEL I plan to develop hands-on expertise in IoT sensor integration using MPU6050, DS18B20, and ACS712, ESP32 microcontroller programming, GSM based cloud connectivity, edge computing fault detection algorithms, WhatsApp API integration for real time alerts, and PCB design for industrial deployment. This hackathon is not just a competition for me. It is the first real step toward turning SENTINEL into a deployable product under my startup Praevirion.
How I Plan to Build It SENTINEL will be built in three phases. Phase 1 focuses on a breadboard proof of concept — integrating vibration, temperature, and current sensors with an ESP32 microcontroller and validating the system on a 0.5HP AC motor. Phase 2 adds the intelligence layer — a three level fault classification system that identifies Normal, Warning, and Critical motor states, triggering instant WhatsApp alerts via GSM SIM800L module and automatic relay based shutdown during critical conditions. Phase 3 focuses on industrial deployment design — replacing the standard current sensor with a clamp-on current transformer for non-invasive measurement on large motors, housing the entire system in an IP65 rated enclosure, and designing a clip-on mounting system that installs on any existing motor in under one hour without any rewiring or motor modification.
Challenges I Anticipate Every real engineering problem comes with real challenges and I have thought through each one carefully. Sensor noise in industrial environments will corrupt raw vibration readings — I plan to solve this using a moving average filter in the ESP32 firmware to stabilize data without introducing response delay. Non-invasive current measurement on live industrial motors is a critical safety requirement — the clamp-on current transformer solves this by clipping around the insulated cable without ever touching live wiring. Most small factories in Coimbatore have no stable WiFi infrastructure — the SIM800L GSM module enables SENTINEL to operate on any 2G network making it deployable across India. Finally keeping the total device cost under ₹8,000 while maintaining industrial grade reliability requires smart component selection — choosing ESP32 over costly alternatives and clamp CT sensors over expensive industrial grade equivalents.
Vision Beyond This Hackathon SENTINEL is not just a hackathon project — it is the beginning of something much larger. The vision is to scale this ground level motor intelligence into a complete industrial health monitoring network, covering not just individual motors but entire factory floors, industrial zones, and eventually infrastructure across India. As the technology matures, the same sensor intelligence that monitors a motor in a Coimbatore factory today can be carried on stratospheric platforms to monitor industrial clusters from above — delivering aerial and space based industrial diagnostics that no solution in the world currently offers. This hackathon is not the destination. It is where the journey begins. The machine never lies. SENTINEL is the system that finally listens.
Built With
- esp32
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