Introduction

Wildfire Alarm is an open-source sensor network for early wildfire detection. Low-cost nodes placed at the forest edge sample the air every 30 seconds, decide on the node itself whether something looks like smoke or fire, and report over cellular to a cloud service that opens an incident and emails the people responsible for that area.

Project website: wildfirealarm.org.

Why Wildfire Alarm?

Wildfires are hardest to stop once they grow past their ignition point, so the first minutes matter. Remote terrain makes cameras and staffed lookouts expensive. A Wildfire Alarm node needs no local infrastructure: a 12 V battery with a solar charge controller, and cellular coverage.

How it works

1. Sense. Each node reads a Bosch BMV080 (PM1, PM2.5, PM10) and a Bosch BME688 (gas resistance, temperature, humidity, pressure) every 30 seconds.
2. Decide on the node. An on-device anomaly detector compares each sample with absolute limits (for example PM2.5 above 55 µg/m³) and with a baseline the node learns for its own spot. Signals must persist for several samples, so a single gust does not trip an alarm. The result is a severity: none, watch, alert, critical or fault.
3. Report. A Blues Notecard sends a batch of readings every 10 minutes (data.qo) and an alert immediately when the severity reaches alert or above (alert.qo). Notehub forwards both to the Wildfire Alarm API.
4. Act. The API opens an incident, emails the hosts with the readings and a map link, and shows it on the dashboard. A host drives out, checks, and records what they found: fire, false alarm, or sensor fault.

The dashboard also shows a live map with the current wind at each node, a rough "where could a fire be in 30, 60 and 120 minutes" envelope, and NASA FIRMS satellite hotspots nearby.

Project structure

Repo	Description
firmware	Arduino firmware for the Nano ESP32 node: sensors, on-device anomaly detection, Notecard uplink
hardware	Carrier PCB (Altium), gerbers, BOM, assembly photos
cloud	Node.js API: Notehub ingest, incidents, email alerts, live map data
dashboard	React web dashboard
infrastructure	Docker Compose stack that runs the database, API and dashboard
data	Open datasets from test burns and field recordings

License

Wildfire Alarm is fully open source. Each kind of work uses the license that fits it:

What	License
Firmware, cloud API, dashboard, website code	Apache License 2.0
Hardware designs (schematics, layout, BOM)	CERN-OHL-P-2.0
Sensor data and documentation text	CC BY 4.0