Emergency Scanner

Inspiration

We were inspired by the idea of placing relevant emergency and dangerous event information rapidly in the hands of ordinary people thereby giving them the power to protect and serve themselves and their communities.

What it does

Our platform listens to local emergency frequencies via a software defined radio for keywords provided by users and sends text message alerts to them in realtime.

How we built it

We setup an interface to store user's phone numbers and keywords in a database. Then we use a software defined radio to listen to local emergency frequencies and send communications through AWS transcription. We compare the result against our database and if we find a matching keyword, we send alerts via Twilio to phone numbers subscribed to said keyword.

Challenges we ran into

Cleaning the noise from the software defined radio and decoding the signal presented a challenge. Differentiating the background noise from communications and clipping only when necessary to prevent data overload also presented issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made a successful platform that could be expanded to many local emergency frequencies allowing more people around the country to keep informed on emergencies in realtime.

What we learned

We learned a tremendous amount from creating the pipeline starting at listening to audio to obtaining a clean parsed string output.

What's next for Emergency Scanner

Expand to track user location and increase software defined radio locations so that more people may subscribe to their local alerts (beyond the South Hadley area).

Built With

• bash
• css
• express.js
• html5
• javascript
• jquery
• mongodb
• python
• rtl
• sdr
• twilio