Jude Pullen and Pete Milne's Flood Alert Is an Arduino Nano 33 IoT-Controlled "Physical App"

Engineers Jude Pullen and Pete Milne have built a compact ePaper and LED display unit, which aims to deliver up-to-date information on local flood risk — a "physical app" that, Pullen says, forms part of a thought experiment in "hyper-local" data.

"This [project] explores what a 'physical app' looks like," Pullen explains. "In this example, we take metrology and geological data from government sources, and create real-time alerts to warn about flood risks. It's called a 'Flood Alert', and is a bit like a 'Smart Home' device as some have called it, as it displays what the risks are if weather is looking unfavorable, and how to prepare."

The heart of the Flood Alert is an Arduino Nano 33 IoT development board, which drives a 2.9" ePaper display and a piezoelectric buzzer plus four key status LEDs: red, yellow, and green, to indicate the highest to the lowest level of flood risk respectively. For those who need connectivity beyond the reach of Wi-Fi, Pullen recommends a cellular travel router and data-only SIM to go with it. "Genuinely these are a bargain," he writes, "for what issues they solve with doing Citizen Science research and data privacy, etc. at ~£70 [around $91] to make those issue 'go away' is such a no-brainer in hindsight. They are even less, since I started this project."

Housed in a 3D-printed case, the Flood Alert sits on the network and polls for information via the UK's Environment Agency's dedicated application programming interface (API). This, however, is only the first part of the project, which Pullen sees extending into "hyper-local" data sources — adding river level sensors which can supplement the broader government data to provide earlier warnings of incoming floods, with the potential to use machine learning algorithms to aggregate and extrapolate data down to an individual property's risk.

A highly detailed write-up of the Flood Alert's development, complete with instructions for building your own, is available in Pullen's Instructables post; the maker has called for interested parties to create their own custom versions tailored for flood data sources outside the UK — and, of course, to use it to help provide early warnings of flood conditions in their areas.