Senseeker Sponsors UCSB Engineering Capstone Wild Fire Defense Project

Kendall Esparza (Mixed Signal IC Design Engineer)

Starting back in August of 2019, Senseeker had the exciting opportunity to sponsor a group of young engineers through the Capstone program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The students were given a simple prompt: to develop a fire detection system that can monitor large areas and sense fires quickly. The four students who signed up for this task were Jeremiah Ford, Jeffrey Li, Prathamesh Nagnoor and Ryan Phan. Their final design, dubbed Forest Field, utilizes a wirelessly integrated network of fire detection modules to collectively monitor large forest areas with a centralized computer.

The Forest Field design is composed of numerous fire detection nodes which are equipped with air quality, temperature, and humidity sensors. Packaged with these sensors is an Arduino MKRZero which both controls the wireless communication and implements a sleep mode to extend the battery life of the module.

The sensor information is routed through neighboring nodes via a LoRaWAN transceiver. The signal propagates via a mesh network to a centralized computer, allowing sensors to cover distances much greater than the range of a single node. This cost-effective solution also increases the robustness of the network, so that a single fail point will not take down the rest of the network downstream.

A single gateway will upload the Forest Field node data to a webserver via Wi-Fi. This can be accessed on a web application designed by the team. A graphic user interface overlays the sensor nodes on an interactive map and displays all key fire metrics. Back end data processing occurs to indicate a fire based on the collected data and displays the information clearly to the user.

With the help of their professors and guidance by team members here at Senseeker, the students at UCSB exceeded our expectations. We were thoroughly impressed with their ideas and execution of our concept. We are grateful to them for their hard work and look forward to working closely with UCSB in the future.

About Senseeker

Senseeker is a wholly US owned transducer IC semiconductor company that specializes in the design of stateof-the-art digital imaging sensors and readout integrated circuits for hybrid infrared image sensing arrays. Senseeker's products and IP enable designers to produce world class infrared image sensing solutions. Read more at https://www.senseeker.com.

Media contact: info@senseeker.com | 1 (805) 617-0337

Insight # IS-20200619-01