UPSTREAM_MESH
Open-source telemetry · Mesh protocol

Distributed environmental sensing & community resilience.

Low-power, solar-powered environmental monitoring and disaster communication for flood-prone, infrastructure-vulnerable river corridors.

  • River level
  • Rainfall
  • Pressure
  • Turbidity
  • Conductivity
  • pH
  • Seismic
  • Hydrophone
>>> PRINCIPLE: "Do not create dependency." Systems stay repairable, extensible, and fully operational offline for local governments, responders, and river communities.
View the repository Technical specs 5-node topology

01 — Stack

System architecture

A modular stack that keeps working without cellular networks, a power grid, or a cloud account.

01 / SENSE

Environmental telemetry

Edge sensing for upstream hydrology and the local microclimate.

  • Ultrasonic and radar river level
  • Tipping-bucket rainfall
  • Barometric pressure, temperature, and humidity
  • Turbidity, conductivity, and pH
  • Seismic vibration and soil saturation
  • Passive bioacoustics and a hydrophone bus
02 / CARRY

MeshCore protocol

A sub-GHz LoRa mesh built for very small frames and broken paths.

  • Multi-hop store-and-forward routing
  • Dynamic failover and link-health rating
  • Cryptographically signed broadcast frames
  • Fast emergency SOS propagation
  • Local offline frame caching
  • No central server in the path
03 / WARN

Civic resilience

A direct line into community disaster preparedness, built to be fixed in the field.

  • Dam spillway and surge alerts
  • Barangay warning-siren triggers
  • Low-cost household receiver beacons
  • Segmented conservation data
  • Field-swappable modules

02 — Field node

Hardware specification

A field-node bill of materials aimed at monsoon exposure, silt, and a long service life.

Subsystem Component Role
Compute ESP32-S3 dual-core Xtensa LX7 Edge processing, sensor aggregation, frame signing
Radio Semtech SX1276 LoRa Sub-GHz mesh at 433, 868, or 915 MHz
Power buffer LiFePO4 / LTO storage Always-on power with high thermal tolerance
Harvester 5 W rugged ETFE monocrystalline panel Off-grid solar recharge
Enclosure UV-stabilized polycarbonate, IP68 Submersible shell, potted electronics
Uplinks Cellular, Starlink, or a local gateway Optional sync after the mesh has already delivered the alert

03 — Corridor

Pilot deployment: Cagayan River Basin

A five-node corridor for proving multi-hop routing, surge-warning speed, and hardware that can sit unattended.

Five-node pilot topology Upstream sensing nodes link through a ridgeline relay to a regional gateway and a barangay alert node. A dashed path skips the relay when the ridge link fails. failover Upstream sensing canyon · flash surge Secondary upstream rate-of-rise check Ridgeline relay line-of-sight span Regional gateway edge buffer · intermittent uplink Community alert sirens · household beacons

Topological schematic. Distances are not to scale. Cyan is the primary path. Amber is failover.

TOPOLOGY

Five roles, one corridor

  • Upstream sensing. High-gradient canyon node. First to see a flash surge.
  • Secondary upstream. Checks rate-of-rise so a single bad reading does not raise the alarm.
  • Ridgeline relay. Elevated line-of-sight hop across terrain the river path cannot cross.
  • Regional gateway. Local buffer. Syncs outward only when Starlink or cellular is actually up.
  • Community alert. Barangay endpoint for sirens, beacons, and the last-mile warning.
COMMONS

Open hardware, paid fieldwork

UpstreamMesh is an open-source commons. The work that gets paid is ruggedized assembly, field deployment, installation, and fitting a corridor to a specific municipality.

  • No required cloud
  • No SaaS tier
  • No vendor lock-in
  • No data harvesting