"Detect and Serve"

"At one point it all went black, we could see fire closing in on all four sides. Our last option was to go down to the back dam, chuck the kids on a raft and chuck blankets over us and try and hope that the fire would jump us."

Daniele Marshall from Gippsland

Fire is an ever present danger here in the hills, surrounded as we are by bush.  It looks lovely but has a devastating hidden side. You may want to spend some time reading about the '67 fires here in Tasmania to get an idea of the horror that can be unleashed by the Australian bush. We narrowly missed the 2003 Canberra fires that took so many homes of our friends, colleagues and neighbours in Warramanga.

So we've been thinking about LoraWan and it's potential to alert people of impending catastrophe if a fire is started. It's already being used in the UK for flood alerts so there's proof of concept and precedent. There are extensive public and private LoraWan networks in Europe, but it's a bit sparse in this wide brown land.

To get our head around how it might work, we mocked up a more traditional wireless network prototype.  Shorter range, but it should give us coverage around the house.

Goodly nerd business

The mock up works fine - see the video below and skip to the four minute mark if you hate high quality gibberish and just want to see the flames.

We'll keep you posted on progress!