Forest Fire Home Guard

Detect a fire/smoke. Notify nearby systems and owner, turn sprinklers on automatically. Sprinkle grass to prevent creating a potential fuel from dry grass.

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🔥Inspiration

Inspired by raising numbers of destroyed buildings by forest fires worldwide 🏠🐨🌴🔥

🔥What it does

Our Forest Fire Home Guard collects data about humidity and temperature around the house, detects external fire and smoke and calculates fire risk. When there is a high probability of fire breaking out, it turns on sprinklers to moisten the lawn and it notifies neighbours too. Fire won't spread that quickly on wet surface and less water will be needed to extinguish it 💦

The owner has an access to a dashboard with a graph of current sensors' state - not only his, but of all neighbours' who use the system, so they can help each other in case of emergency (that's what neighbours are for, right?) 🤝 If you are not at home watching the dashboard, don't worry, you will get an email notification as well.

What's more, if 50% of nearby house guards report fire, all of the sprinklers in the system turn on to help put out the fire, which extremely likely is a real forest fire and not a random 'BBQ gone wrong'.

After successfully extinguishing the fire, the system sends the awesome news to the neighbours.

🔥How we built it

Hardware we used:

  • ESP32 microcontroller
  • temperature & humidity sensor
  • flame sensor
  • smoke sensor
  • micro submersible water pump
  • digital 10A relay
  • 9V alkaline battery

We made two identical sets of devices to show how the communication works.

Process:

Code is written in Python and transferred to the microcontroller using Thonny editor. We simulate more devices and handle the communication between them using Node-RED. Data is stored in influxDB and visualised in Grafana. The backend was fully implemented with Docker 🐋

🔥Challenges we ran into

The hardware part was the biggest challenge. Values under which we were recognising fire and smoke in the interior were different from exterior values. We needed to adjust them experimentally. Also we had a long lasting trouble with not working communication between the devices. The problem was in using the same client id for multiple devices.

🔥Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very happy that our system works with multiple real devices and that the idea we had came to life with such an artistic representation.

🔥What we learned

The ESP32 microcontroller and these specific sensors were new to us, so we spent a fun week exploring their and our capabilities.

🔥What's next for Forest Fire Home Guard

Of course, our model can't be used in this form in real life. That's why we would use

  • solar panels for sustainable charging
  • infrared camera for flame detection
  • better sensors (generally)
  • rainwater tanks

to implement this system.

Thanks for your support and stay on track, we'll keep you updated!

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