Automated Fire Suppression System

The Automated Fire Suppression System searches for fires with a thermal sensor and puts them out with a blast of water. This was our fourth year EE final design project.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• EE401
• AFSS
• fire
• robot
• microcontroller
• sensor

[ThatDashNoob]

the TPA81 thermal sensor from Devantech produces a thermal very simple thermal image right? how then did u manage to locate a single point within that image if u are panning it around the robot head? Surely locating the highest temperature pixel isn't difficult but panning this means u will get duplicates at every data interval? Im very interested as to how u generated the polar coordinate. sorry if this is a stupid question.

[piduceco]

@ThatDashNoob

You can think of the TPA81 as a thermal camera with 8 pixels arranged in a row. Panning it around let us construct a kind of panoramic thermal picture. Once you have the picture, you only need a bit of trig to figure out how to aim the water cannon.

[Firesprink72]

The creativity and engineering skill that was put into this machine are amazing. Please don't take offense at a little criticizm. I can't help but wonder how effective this would be (even on a larger scale) against a REAL fire. Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest ones. Existing fire protection systems are already amazing. If you want to see MY version of your device, check out my YouTube page. THAT would handle a fire!

[piduceco]

No offense taken. This project was just a fun way to demonstrate interfacing microcontrollers to sensors with a bit of wireless communications. This devise wouldn't be very effective against a real fire, but it was good enough to help me get a engineering job!

[alwinz33]

What is the device with the display of distance that you were pressing during the demonstration?

Thx...

[piduceco]

The sensor computer determines the polar coordinates of all the targets and sends them to the water cannon computer and to the user interface through a IR link. What you saw was the user scrolling through a list of target coordinates on the user interface.

[ThatDashNoob]

@piduceco Thanks for that really quick reply, just one more question. how difficult did u find working with the sensor and interfacing with the other components such as the servo motor which controlled the rotation? I see I2C is used was that at all a hinderance?