Air quality is becoming a major issue these days, and not just for cities like Beijing and Los Angeles. It’s important for health, our environment, and our economy no matter where we live. To that end, [Radu] has been working on air quality monitors that will be widely deployed in order to give a high-resolution air quality picture, and he’s starting in his home city of Timisoara, Romania.
[Radu] built a similar device to measure background radiation (a 2014 Hackaday Prize Semifinalist), and another to measure air quality in several ways (a 2015 Hackaday Prize Finalist and a Best Product Finalist; winners will be announced next weekend). He is using the platforms as models for his new meter. The device will use a VOC air sensor and an optical dust sensor in a mobile unit connected to a car to gather data, and from that a heat map of air quality will be generated. There are also sensors for temperature, pressure, humidity, and background radiation. The backbone of the project is a smart phone which will upload the data to a server.
We’ve seen other air quality meters before as well, and even ones based around the Raspberry Pi, but this one has a much broader range of data that it is acquiring. Its ability to be implemented as an array of sensors to gather data for an entire city is impressive as well. We can envision sensor networks installed on public transportation but to get to all parts of every neighborhood it would be interesting to team up with the Google Streetview Cars, Uber, or UPS.
A thought… How difficult would it be to make something using simple optics, a proper kind of CCD and a grating to get a spectrum snapshot of the air?
Hi Teukka, it can be done, and I have some plans to go that direction (not CCDs but common photo-electronics). The challenge will be to setup a calibration environment.
I have access in Cluj to professional equipment like spectrometers, gas chromatographs and many others, for pollutants measurements in air, liquid, soil. If you think it would help, I am available.
Most likely that could help, please drop me an email: http://www.pocketmagic.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/radu_motisan_email.jpg
if any of those are from Shimadzu, I think we are going to meet sooner or later….
Might I suggest you take a look at this project? http://ispex.nl/techniek/
Love it! thanks
Here are some interesting results from the first test in Timisoara: http://www.pocketmagic.net/city-air-quality/#results
You might be interested in one project to put air quality sensors on streetview cars:
http://insights.aclima.io/
-Preston
These people might be interested in the data you collect from it. http://waqi.info/
What is the point of these radiation monitoring projects? I see them popping up constantly. The hard-on in the hacker community for something completely pointless is utterly perplexing.
Collaborative haze mapping in Singapore: http://rolandturner.com/yahi/