He started a wildfire detector in fifth grade. Now a fire authority uses it.
Ryan Honary's SensoRy AI went from a science project to sensors in Orange County open space, with the county fire authority as a partner.
Most fifth-grade science projects end up in a closet. Ryan Honary’s ended up on a hillside in Irvine, watching for smoke.
Honary was in fifth grade when the 2018 Camp Fire killed 85 people in Butte County. Spectrum News reported that he was away at a tennis tournament when he saw it on television. He went home and started building a heat-detection system. That project became SensoRy AI, and NBC Los Angeles reported that the early version won a grant.
What the sensors do
The current system is a solar-powered mesh network of sensors, according to Spectrum News. It adds 360-degree rotating infrared cameras, a small weather station and machine learning, and it sends alerts to an app. It is also meant to predict where a fire may head next.
The pitch is size. “The whole idea of my platform is to be able to detect the fire when it is smaller than one foot by one foot,” Honary told KRDO. Spectrum News quoted him on range: flames of 6 inches, in direct line of sight, up to 3,000 feet away. Those figures are his, not an independent test.
From garage to preserve
Spectrum News first met Honary in 2022, in his garage. By February 2025 the system went into the Irvine Open Space Preserve, with the City of Irvine and the Orange County Fire Authority involved. KRDO reported that the Irvine Ranch Conservancy provided $250,000 in funding, and that the fire authority hoped to have 25 detectors installed in its most fire-prone areas by the end of that year.
OCFA Fire Chief Brian Fennessy said in the KRDO piece that “early detection is one of our greatest weapons in what has become a year-round fire season.” Division Chief Kevin Fetterman, who has advised Honary for several years, told Spectrum News that “we see technology in the wildfire space as a force multiplier.”
NBC Los Angeles identified Honary as a 16-year-old at Stanford Online High School. It also listed a Naval Science Award from the Office of Naval Research and the grand prize at the 2019 Ignite Innovation Student Challenge among his honors.
What to watch
Coverage agrees on the project and the partners. It differs on the origin fire: KRDO says the 1993 Laguna Fire inspired him, while NBC and Spectrum say Camp. We went with the two that agree. The public record also does not include independent detection data, so the claims about range are worth reading as a founder’s numbers.
Still, “a county fire authority is testing it” is a sentence few teenage projects get to earn. His stated goal, per Spectrum News, is that “one day, wildfires seem to pose little to no threat.”
