The Lab — civic sensing
The Lab
The Digital Sidewalk Lab's live civic sensing console, the phone-based sensor rig, the published Clemson ice-storm dataset, and how to host a node.
The Lab is the part of Digital Sidewalk Lab that runs outdoors. It is a civic and environmental sensing platform built from ordinary devices, an open schema, and a public record.
The console
The field-test console is live. It shows a layered map with weather overlays, a camera wall with source health, a form for community observations that expire after twelve hours and are marked unverified by default, and a status ticker of official advisories. It was deployed in January 2026 under the working name StormNet and remains at its original address while it is moved to this domain. It renders in the browser from JavaScript.
The console is a research instrument. It is not an emergency service, a rescue coordination board, or a substitute for official weather information, and it says so on every screen.
The rig
A node is a phone or tablet running the Lab's sensor app. The app samples the barometer, the accelerometer, and the microphone, computes three audio summary features on the device, and posts a small packet roughly every five seconds. Raw audio never leaves the device. Coordinates are blurred to roughly one kilometer before storage.
The first rig was a two-device differential: one unit outdoors, one indoors, so that the difference between them, not either alone, is the measurement. It recorded a complete ice storm in Clemson, South Carolina, on January 24–25, 2026.
The dataset
The ice-storm file contains 23,451 samples over about 17.5 hours. It records a barometric drop of roughly 10.8 hectopascals across the front, 82 flagged outdoor audio events, and a shift in spectral centroid toward roughly 3,500–3,900 hertz during ice compared with rain. The microphones were not calibrated against a reference; levels are relative. The file is licensed CC BY 4.0 and ships with a reference detector that reproduces the event count. The journal entry on the dataset states every limit.
Open source
The platform, the sensor app, the ingest service, the console, the schema, the dataset, and the reference detector are being released under the Apache License 2.0 with a pluggable detection interface. The Lab's own detection engine, THRML, is proprietary, plugs into the same interface, and is not required to run the platform. The repository address will be added here at public release.
Host a node
The Digital Sidewalk Lab will be open to collaborators for open source projects soon. Every honest storm-hour is a contribution. Write to the Lab through the parent company's LinkedIn page, and say where you are and what devices you have.
Demonstrations
An earlier demonstration built by the Lab, a Starlink constellation visualization using D3 force simulation and React, remains available.