The problem: Smoke is hazardous for our health, especially particulate matter which refers to small solid or liquid particles floating in the air. Air quality data is not readily available for many areas, affordable, or easy to find – which makes making choices about being outside difficult.
The solution: Create a network of affordable, easy to install, and reliable air quality sensors and make the data accessible to everyone.
Poor air quality is a health risk for everyone, and it’s especially hard for folks with conditions like COPD, the elderly, infants, and children. Having air quality data about the areas you live in can help us make better decisions about when to go outside and what sort of activities we can do while outside.
Other services, like PurpleAir, offer expensive air quality monitors and the ability to contribute to their data, but ultimately they own the data. Right now, their air quality monitors sells for US$250 (CAD$314) – that’s not really in reach of many folks and gets expensive if you want to buy 10 or 20 of them.
What you can do:
- Buy an air quality sensor and contribute data to our network
- Build your own and use our firmware (instructions coming soon. I also want to have sessions where you can learn how to build one yourself)
- Donate so I can build them and keep the lights on our servers
- Tell your friends
Technology
Currently I am using:
- Nova PM (SDS011) Air Quality sensors (these measure PM10 and PM2.5)
- NodeMCU (ESP8266) Arduino development board (this is the main chip that has WiFi)
- Plantower 7003 Air Quality sensors (these measure PM1, PM2.5, and PM10)
- Thingspeak.com to collect and visualize the data
- Leaflet to display a Map (with OpenStreetMap)
- WordPress to power this site.