Flood donations pile up in some places while other lanes say aid never arrived

5 ways to tackle it

• Hardware and sensors

  Lane Tag: an NFC tag and e-ink board at the lane mouth showing what arrived

  A volunteer boat or truck taps a phone on the tag at the lane entrance and picks what was dropped: water, kits, cooked meals, and how many. The e-ink board next to the tag shows what arrived and when, and what the lane still needs. Residents see it, and the next donor sees whether to come here or go to a lane with nothing.

  Build with NFC NTAG215, ESP32 with SIM or Wi-Fi hotspot, 4.2in e-ink, solar bank, Supabase

• Camera and vision

  Fair Pile: photograph a pile of donated goods and get a fair split per lane

  A leader unloading 650 kits and 6,000 water bottles photographs the stack. Claude vision counts items by type, then splits them across lanes by household count so no lane is skipped. It prints a delivery slip per lane with exact quantities.

  Build with Claude vision, Next.js, Google Sheet of lanes and households, A5 print

• AI agent

  Where to Drop: tell a donor which lane has nothing yet and print the delivery label

  A donor types how many kits or meals they can bring. The agent checks the Lane Tag records and sign-ups, picks the three lanes with the least logged, and prints a label with the lane name, contact and a hand-drawn style map for the driver. It turns a pile at City Hall into deliveries to the places that were missed.

  Build with Claude, Supabase, Google Maps static map, PDF label generator

• iPhone and Android app

  Boat Run: an offline app for volunteers delivering by boat

  Before leaving the dock the app downloads the lane list, house numbers and each stop's order. On the water with no signal, the volunteer ticks delivered or skipped, and the ticks sync when the boat returns to a dry spot. A skipped house shows up first on the next run.

  Build with PWA with IndexedDB, Leaflet offline tiles, Supabase sync, QR code for dock download

• Camera and vision

  Lane Pool: neighbors pool money and every transfer slip becomes a public ledger

  When a lane pools money for boats, food and pumps, each person photographs their transfer slip. Claude vision reads the amount and name into a shared sheet and a printed A4 ledger gets taped to the lane sign. Everyone can see where the money went, so trust stays high and people keep giving.

  Build with Claude vision, Google Sheets, Next.js, A4 print