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IEMI Labs
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IndustrialDesign complete (stages 1–6), not built

EmberWatch AI

After-hours thermal pile watch that adds early warning to your existing fire system

Watches bales, piles and battery cages overnight with radiometric thermal heads and alerts the on-call person when a hot spot is growing, with an optional supervisory signal to the existing fire panel.

Who buys it
Operations manager at a small or mid-size recycling facility, transfer station or scrap yard, sold and installed through the site's licensed fire-alarm contractor.
Why it pays
448 waste and recycling facility fires were publicly reported in the US and Canada in 2025. Catching one overnight smoulder early can avoid a shutdown and a claim of $100k–$1M+ (est.), at a fraction of a $150k–250k detection-and-suppression install.
Target price
$1,290 per thermal head + $1,490 site hub + $39/head/month (target)
First-minute wow
A phone alert showing a tracked hot spot in the bale aisle, '+11 °C in 14 min, not a vehicle', with the thermal and colour clip side by side.
See the CAD designConcept page
EmberWatch AI concept: the idea and where each part goes
The concept. The CAD design is below, under Printable CAD.

What the research found

And how this design answers it

  • Life-safety liability → sold only as supplementary early warning next to a listed fire system; supervisory output via a listed monitor module fitted by a licensed contractor; never wired to suppression
  • Expensive incumbents ($150k–250k installs) → zone-targeted add-on heads at $1,290 for sites with no thermal coverage at all
  • Cheap fixed-threshold thermal cameras false-alarm on loader exhausts → rise-rate blob tracking plus vehicle masks from a colour camera, with measured false-alarm targets
  • Low-resolution core → honest zone coverage (about 11 × 8 m per head at 10 m) instead of whole-hall claims
  • Dust and €490 germanium windows → $0.25 replaceable HDPE film cartridge and an optional purge-air port
  • Sites that need listed detection → Integrator tier runs our analytics on an ANSI/FM 3260-approved camera

Use case

Bale smoulder at 1:40 am

Night on-call supervisorPlant managerFire-alarm monitoring company

  1. 01Trigger: a crushed lithium cell inside a PET bale starts self-heating after the shift ends
  2. 02Detection: the bale-aisle head tracks a blob rising 0.8 °C/min, +10 °C above its own baseline for 3 minutes, not inside a vehicle mask
  3. 03Alert: the on-call phone gets a WARN with the thermal and colour clip; still rising, it escalates to ALERT, closes the supervisory contact and starts the call tree
  4. 04Action: the supervisor drives in and pulls the bale with the loader before flames appear

Outcome: No fire and no shutdown; a $100k–$1M+ loss avoided (est.)

How it works

Architecture

  1. 01

    Sense: FLIR Lepton 3.5 radiometric heads on PoE, plus a bought colour camera per area

  2. 02

    Decide: IEMI Edge Hub tracks each hot spot's rise rate and area, and masks vehicles and people using on-device AI

  3. 03

    Send: events and small clips only, over outbound MQTT/TLS; dry-contact and Modbus TCP outputs on site

  4. 04

    Tell: SMS and voice call tree, phone app, nightly and 90-day pile-temperature reports

Hardware

Real parts, buyable today

Bill of materials: about $276 per pilot head and $1,760 of hardware for a 4-head site (est.).

BlockPartWhy this part
Thermal coreFLIR Lepton 3.5 (500-0771-01), 160×120 radiometric$164, US-made, shutter-calibrated, proven on ESP32
Head MCU + PoEOlimex ESP32-POE-ISO (pilot) → ESP32-S3 + W5500 + Silvertel Ag9905 (production)One isolated Cat6 cable per head, about 1 W
Window0.5 mm HDPE film cartridgeReplaceable in 10 s for about $0.25, instead of a €490 germanium window
Site hubIEMI Edge Hub: Raspberry Pi 5 8GB + AI HAT+ 26 TOPS (Hailo-8)Reused platform; runs vehicle masks and smoke confirmation
Panel interfaceRelay node with Omron G6K-2F-Y relaysDry contacts to a listed monitor module; fail-safe trouble contact

Mechanical

Printable CAD

11 parts, generated from code and checked as closed solids. Pick a part to inspect it, or download the STL files to print.

See the CAD parts render
EmberWatch AI printable parts, rendered from the CAD
Render of the printable parts from the actual CAD. Not yet printed or photographed.

Loading the CAD…

Real CAD · drag to rotate · scroll to zoomReal CAD · swipe sideways

Open risks we are working on

  • Demand: small sites may not pay about $6.7k when a night walk-round is free, and no insurer credit is confirmed
  • False alarms in real tipping halls (exhaust, sun, hot metal) are not measured yet
  • Lepton accuracy (±5 °C typical) and HDPE film transmission need bench calibration
  • NRTL listing cost and the AHJ's acceptance of the panel interconnection vary by site
  • Coverage per head is small, so large halls need many heads or the Integrator tier

Design stage only: nothing on this page is for sale. Specifications and prices are targets.