GLIDAR came alive during a two-day defence hackathon. I wanted something that could help a team in a live 3D battlefield, not just look good in slides.
Starting from the brief
The judges asked for fast situational awareness, so I divided the problem into small pods and a human facing dashboard that anyone in the squad could read.
- I grouped the pods into triangles so I always have at least three arrival times.
- Each ESP32 forwards a time stamp to a Node.js collector that logs it before doing any heavy maths.
- The dashboard turns those numbers into a heading arrow so the team knows which sector to sweep.
What I am refining
Next I am hardening the mesh so it survives without Wi-Fi and pairing the logs with a cleaner trilateration helper that can run on a rugged laptop.