Soul Signal

Keeping you connected, one tower at a time :))

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Inspiration

We believe connection is everything—between people, devices, and networks. During our talks with Verizon teams, three pain points kept surfacing: safety, speed, and cost. That sparked our mission: to build a solution that doesn’t force trade-offs between them.

But we also wanted to align with our ethos of smart reuse. We noticed that many hardware components used in large-scale projects are often discarded prematurely, however we wanted to reuse them. Why scrap old hardware when it can be repurposed to strengthen networks? By bridging the gap between sustainability and performance, we’re not just solving problems, we’re rethinking how tech evolves.

What It Does

Soul Signal is a comprehensive drone inspection platform with four integrated components:

1. Computer Vision Analysis

  • Automatically classifies objects in drone-captured images using a Roboflow trained model
  • Identifies anomalies like birds' nests and tower types
  • Generates actionable insights through an interactive dashboard

2. Lil' Raccoon (NLP Chatbot)

  • Conversational AI assistant for querying inspection data
  • Provides natural language explanations of dashboard insights using Gemini
  • Answers technical questions about tower conditions

3. VR Immersion

  • Virtual reality interface for on-site visualization
  • View drone footage of specific towers in 360°
  • Thermal imaging overlay, done via Unity shaders, highlights potential issues with the tower overheating, and detecting anomalies up close that would have otherwise been impossible without VR.

4. Hardware Integration

  • Wearable actuator bracelet connected to thermal data integrated with Raspberry Pi
    • Bracelet consists of 4 vibrotactile actuators and one buzzer providing sound-based feedback
  • Provides haptic feedback based on thermal imaging analysis
    • When users come across an anomaly of high importance, the bracelet vibrates and the buzzer emits sound in the direction that the anomaly is located in the video
  • Alerts technicians to critical temperature changes in real-time
  • Please check out this video (and have your volume up so you can listen to the buzz! 🐝).

By combining these technologies, Soul Signal creates a complete inspection-to-action pipeline for tower maintenance teams.

How we built it

Soul Signal was developed as a full-stack solution using React for our interactive dashboard frontend, Axios for efficient API communication, and Express for our backend server infrastructure. For computer vision capabilities, we used Roboflow to classify and segment drone images, enabling precise detection of towers and birds' nests. Our AI assistant, Lil' Raccoon, is powered by Gemini 1.5 Pro, which we carefully prompt-engineered to provide accurate, contextual responses about infrastructure insights. The VR component was built in Unity to create immersive 360° tower inspections with thermal imaging overlays. On the hardware side, we integrated Raspberry Pi with vibrotactile actuators to develop our wearable alert system, translating thermal data into real-time haptic feedback for technicians in the field. This multidisciplinary approach allowed us to create a pipeline from drone capture to actionable insights.

Challenges we ran into

Working on Soul Signal, we encountered a multitude of challenges we had to overcome. The most significant challenges we ran into were using new technologies. We were intrigued by Gemini API and wanted to integrate a chatbot into our application - However, this was no easy feat. From being able to properly configure console settings to access the API, and hours of work and learning, we were finally able to make the chatbot a reality, customizing it to the needs of application with custom prompting.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Having a complete product with multiple facets like we envisioned was the most rewarding part of working on Soul Signal. From making a stunning and dynamic webpage integrating cutting-edge AI and Deep Learning technologies to innovative Virtual Reality experiences allowing for up close analysis of the towers. We bring to life a new world of data analytics to cell towers.

What we learned

Working on Soul Signal we encountered great learning opportunities which ultimately come by overcoming challenges. Through problem solving and long hours together, we recognized the importance of teamwork, communication, and positivity in working through these issues together.

What's next for Soul Signal

We aspire for Soul Signal to take on further capacity. Some next steps we can see are making the wearable device a more usable product than a prototype, increase the breadth of the computer vision analytics with more data and features as well as a more immersive VR experience. The possibilities for Soul Signal is something we find promise in.

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