The project aimed to develop a simple, yet effective, IoT-device that could help monitor heat generation in wide areas (e.g a disposal processing plant) and notify personel and/or ultimately the fire brigade.
The idea came from a relative who works as an engineer at a municipality energy department.
He described how the vast property of a disposal processing plant or a recycling facility can be hard to monitor. A fire can be devastating so if heat generation can be detected in an early stage, the risk of injuries and damage on environment can be minimized.
Develop an airborne product that periodically measures surface temperature to detect anomalies and report them via wireless network for visualization and notifications to supervisors.
Presentation movie on Youtube: Link
By connecting a thermal sensor to a Pycom micro-controller we were able to fetch data that could be processed and transmitted via LoRa. The devices were attached to a drone to be airborne and also powered by it's battery. The collected data is the temperature from each pixel in the sensor as well as the drone battery voltage that we measured through a voltage divider. Measured temperature will decrease over distance so compensating for that inaccuracy is part of the edge processing. The data is sent to The Things Network which is a LoRa server community and then forwarded via web-hooks to the service integrator IFTTT and the IoT platform Ubidots. Ubidots is used to visualize the data in a dashboard and also to trigger alarm notifications. We use IFTTT to log data into a spreadsheet on Google Drive. Slack is used for notifications since it's a widly used platform were it's easy to add supervisors that should respond to alarms.
While we think all the primarily requirements have been fulfilled, this project has many development possibilities. We used a drone that was already in our posses so in order to make scheduled and pre-defined flights we would have to have another drone. Our initial plan was also to extract GPS coordinates from the drone but after some research this would require much deeper knowledge about the internal software.
Summarized it has been a tremendously fun project where we are well underway to create a device that really could be a great help and service to the real world.