Projects

Street Tree Monitoring Network (STEM)

May 2021 โ€“ Summer 2024 ยท DevPost

Note๐Ÿ† 1st Place โ€” Microsoft Azure IoT Hack for Sustainability (Global)

Built a deployment-ready demo in 48 hours. Endorsed by San Josรฉ city arborists and backed by peer-reviewed urban forestry research.

STEM Network dashboard

STEM Network live dashboard showing soil moisture readings across monitored trees

Urban forests are critical infrastructure โ€” but newly-planted street trees have up to 30% annual mortality, largely from inadequate watering during the first few years of establishment. STEM is a city-scale IoT sensor network that gives urban foresters real-time soil moisture visibility across every monitored tree, turning reactive tree care into data-driven stewardship.

What started as a hackathon project became a real deployment. After winning globally, I took STEM from prototype to a working local network โ€” securing Microsoft for Startups backing and $10,000 from the City of Boulder, Colorado to fund the first sensor rollout. I continued developing the system as a Purdue directed project, spending the summer of 2024 on the hardware side: designing and building out a LoRaWAN gateway and conducting a rigorous embedded system power study to validate the 5-year battery life target for field-deployed sensor nodes.

Each node is a capacitive moisture sensor paired with an ESP32 microcontroller, potted in vandalism-resistant PVC housing for underground installation. Readings stream over MQTT โ†’ LoRaWAN gateway โ†’ Azure IoT Hub โ†’ Stream Analytics โ†’ SQL Server, surfaced through an ASP.NET Core dashboard with Azure Maps and Charts.js for geospatial and historical views.

๐Ÿš€ Deployment Taken to a live local network โ€” from 48-hour demo to real-world rollout
๐Ÿ’ฐ Funding $110,000 total โ€” $100K Microsoft for Startups credits + $10K City of Boulder
๐ŸŒ Hackathon 1st place globally, Microsoft Azure IoT Hack for Sustainability
๐Ÿ“ก Hardware Built LoRaWAN gateway + embedded power study (Summer 2024)
๐ŸŽ“ Academic Continued as a Purdue directed project through graduation
๐ŸŒฒ Problem 30% annual urban tree mortality โ€” solved through continuous soil monitoring

Stack:

C# .NET / ASP.NET Core Python ESP32

Azure IoT Hub Azure Stream Analytics Azure Blob Storage Azure SQL Server Azure Maps Microsoft for Startups

LoRaWAN MQTT Embedded Systems Power Analysis Bootstrap Charts.js

Azure architecture Hardware sensor