Plan and Design:

Stakeholders and their needs:

Fire departments:

Fire departments need to know what areas are at risk of wildfire, and when a wildfire is currently happening. This information needs to be delivered quickly and precisely for an effective response.

Landowners:

Landowners also need to know if their land is at risk of fire, how to prevent fires and to be notified when a fire starts, to clear people, livestock or assets from the area. Knowledge of risk level is also useful for the insurance of land against potential damage from wildfires.

General Public:

The public also needs to be aware of wildfire risk to stay away from high-risk areas and to not do risky actions such as smoking, barbequing or starting campfires which might start a wildfire.

Government Bodies:

Government bodies should also be aware of wildfire risk and effects.

System requirements:

To satisfy these stakeholder requirements, the system will:

• Constantly monitor weather conditions.
• Calculate fire risk using weather data and other data.
• Make weather and fire risk data available to stakeholders.
• Be remotely deployable for long periods of time in potentially hard to reach areas.
• Quickly alert stakeholders when a wildfire has started.

System design:

The system will use the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) model to calculate fire risk.
The FWI model was initally developed by the Canadian Weather Service, and is used in Canada, France, Australia and most importantly Ireland.
The FWI model takes temperature, relative humidity, air pressure, wind speed, rainfall and day length into account.

The fire risk and weather data will be uploaded by the embedded system onto a flask server which will process the data and make it available to stakeholders.
The embedded system will use the LTE (4G) standard to connect to the server.
LTE is useful as it has widespread usage, it is mature as a technology, and has a higher range compared to 5G.

To fulfil all the above system requirements, I have selected the following parts.
These parts are mainly designed and marketed to the hobby electronics market, as such they are generally larger and costlier but more user friendly.
These parts are therefore useful for the initial design stage where size and cost do not have to be optimised, rather the functionality needs to be tested.
While these parts are for the hobbyist market, the sensors and modules which they are designed around, are often of professional quality, made by large manufacturers and actively used in industry.

• The system will be built around the Pimoroni Pico LiPo 2 XL W, this board is built around the RP2350 chip and adds lots of useful functionality such as high connectivity, built in battery management and relatively high amounts of flash memory and RAM.
• The system will use several sensors to detect wildfires and to calculate wildfire risk:
  • The system will include a Bosch BME 688 to measure air temperature, air humidity, air pressure and the concentration of volatile organic compounds.
    This sensor is used by Dryad Networks' Wildfire sensors, and the specification document lists wildfire detection as a recommended application.
  • The system will use a Sensirion SCD-30 to detect the level of carbon dioxide in the air.
    This sensor is better than most other carbon sensors as it uses NDIR technology to measure only carbon dioxide levels.
    Other sensors typically measure VOC levels and calculate a “eCo2” value, which is only an estimate based on the VOC data.
  • The system will use a “Ultimate GPS Breakout” from Adafruit, to read GPS data which will be used to get harder to record data like rain and wind data from the nearest Met Eireann station which is used in fire risk calculations. This GPS module is in theory no better than any other, as modules are limited in accuracy by the GPS system itself rather than their own hardware. The only reason this breakout was selected was the quality of documentation and ease of use.
  • The system will also use a Pimoroni LTE clipper to ensure connectivity to the internet from most/all of Ireland. This means that data can be stored securely on the cloud and the data made visible through a web dashboard. It will also be used to rapidly inform stakeholders of wildfires via. SMS.
  • The system will also include a Lithium-Ion battery for long term battery power, a solar panel to provide electricity and an SD card breakout to store data locally.

Bill of materials:

Part Name	Contact	Country
Alfreds Futterkiste	Maria Anders	Germany
Centro comercial Moctezuma	Francisco Chang	Mexico