Editor’s note: Este artículo está traducido al español.

The devastating wildfires in the Los Angeles area earlier this year inspired a trio of UNLV engineering students to design a device to detect fires in hard-to-reach areas, whether outdoors or inside.

The prototype, about the size of a vintage desktop TV set, was outfitted with a camera that recognized the flame of a Bic lighter and tracked it as it moved, showing that it could hone in on even the smallest fire.

Henry Gonzalez Monroy, Aaron Olson and Dillon Mims, electrical engineering majors who will graduate later this month, built this device because they wanted to make firefighting safer in the extreme heat, smoke and instability inherent in burning conditions. It can be used one at a time, or a system of dozens linked together, as a fixed or mobile piece of equipment — an evolution from the design they first envisioned as mounted to the belly of an aerial drone.

“We took it from a fixed system used on a drone and made it into a modular system that can be applied to basically anything — drones, cars, ATVs, land drones,” Gonzalez Monroy said. “It can be set up in warehouses where metal work’s being done and metal can ignite, or farmers can use it on their crop fields.”

Gonzalez Monroy, Olson and Mims were among the 40-plus teams of students across engineering and computer science disciplines to participate last week in the biannual Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition.

It’s a capstone experience where emerging engineers can show industry professionals the prototypes they spent a year conceptualizing and building.

In addition to their senior project, Gonzalez Monroy has been interning for a year with NV Energy, most recently working on coal plant conversions to natural gas. Olson is at the Las Vegas Valley Water District, which needs electrical engineers for the equipment that disinfects water or pumps it uphill. Mims works with an artist who uses sophisticated electronics in his installations.

All three grew up in Las Vegas; Gonzalez Monroy and Olson were high school classmates at Northwest Career and Technical Academy. They graduate with their bachelor’s degrees Dec. 17.

Getting there with their fire detection system required resilience.

The California fires were burning when the three started planning their project in January.

They drew up a device that could be mounted on the belly of a drone and flown over fires to let firefighters know exactly where to drop flame retardant.

But when their drone arrived from China in the spring, it was just after the Trump administration’s 145% tariffs on Chinese imports went into effect. A drone the students expected to spend $900 on would now cost them about $2,300, Olson said. They earn less than $20 an hour at their internships so it took them a couple of weeks to get the rest of the money together. By then, the drone had been sent back.

With much of their first semester working on the project over, the group scratched the drone and went with something less complicated ­­— “but I do like the direction we ended up going with our project instead,” Gonzalez Monroy said last week from the booth where the team had their prototype set up outside the Advanced Engineering Building.

Their device can still autonomously detect fires, hot spots and potential victims in enclosed, large spaces like warehouses, tight quarters like below deck on ships and open but expansive spaces like farmland. Taking it off the drone geared toward wildfires widened the potential market, the group agreed.

“It can be something that so many different people can use, and it can save so many lives in so many different areas, whether it’s industrial hazards or fires that start in remote areas,” Mims said. “Even moving it away from fire detection, we do have the ability as well to implement custom detection networks — say you want to do some home security system with facial detection.”

The need to pivot and adapt opened the possibilities, he said. “That’s one of the best things that happened out of it.”

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