Cave exploration made safer with the Nicla Sense ME-powered Sajac Venture

The artwork of cave exploration, or spelunking, can get its practitioners far nearer to nature and the land we inhabit, however it additionally comes with a bunch of potential risks. Some embody excessive environmental situations, lack of oxygen/poisonous gases, and easily having their path closed off as a consequence of rock falls. Seeing these issues, Rifqi Abdillah determined to create the Sajac Project based mostly on the Nicla Sense ME hooked up to a Ok-Method jacket with the purpose of helping cavers.

As a result of the Nicla Sense ME incorporates a mix of movement, stress, and gasoline sensors onboard, Abdillah used it to collect uncooked information concerning the wearer’s environment by constantly taking readings after which transmitting the values over BLE to a cell gadget. Every sensor fusion pattern was then added to the Edge Impulse Studio and labeled with both “protected,” “dangerous,” or “hazard” relying on how dangerous the situations could be. Lastly, a Keras classification mannequin was educated and deployed again to the Nicla as an Arduino library, which is used together with an OLED display screen to point out the classification consequence.

With the mannequin now outputting the sensor readings and if they’re protected or unsafe, Abdillah went one step additional and developed an app to show them in real-time on a Seeed Studio Wio Terminal. Inbuilt MIT’s App Inventor, it permits the consumer to pick the present standing as proven by the Nicla and have it seem on the Terminal’s display screen. Fellow cavers are capable of be notified in an emergency through a linked LoRa radio that may transmit an alert message. 

For extra particulars on this proof of idea, which was shortlisted as a part of our Ok-Method competitors, you may learn Abdillah’s well-documented write-up on the Arduino Project Hub. It was additionally featured on our Arduino Day 2023 livestream, which you can see here.