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Workshop: measuring air quality

By a twist of destiny I attended a one-day workshop for the development of an air quality measurement device. The workshop was initiated by Ed Borden (Pachube) and preceded by two other workshops held in Amsterdam and New York. Instead of endless philosophizing about the ever imminent Internet of Things (or IoT), this workshop was aimed at working a prototype. Name of the prototype: the AirQualityEgg.

Although my personal preparation was non-existent, there were folks coming from the UK, Belgium and even Spain. Really inspiring to see such enthusiasm around a theme which impacts us all.

The Goal

The day started with a kick off in the amazing Theatrum Anatomicum at the Waag society. The initial Amsterdam workshop was spend mostly discussing the consumer/user side. Why and what would somebody actually do with air quality information? The successive workshop – held in New York -  was spend with the actually realization of how a possible prototype could look like. The thesis of this workshop was to continue where the process in New York had ended, loosely summarized:

Select sensors to be integrated into the AirQualityEgg based on the their testing results and data transmitted.

After a quick headcount of the various disciplines present (hardware folks, software folks, and philoshophers) the group was divided in several smaller work-teams. Each team was asked to test one or more sensors and analyse their functioning and data it was transmitting. There were sensors of all kinds of pollutants such as CO, CO2, and NO2.

Results?

The challenge of these kind of mixed background workshops ,with many unknowns, is always to get results. Any result. But before I jump to that, here is a quick sketch of the basic infrastructure to get the sensors working:

• Sensor – the sensing device of pollutants
• Nanode – an Arduino-based board with integrated Ethernet
• Pachube – a webapp for storing and querying the data

Although I had never worked with Arduino-stuff, my team consisted of two very bright guys, who were capable of making the electronics and the software work together. Because getting a sensor working is not exactly Windows plug-and-play, it requires some serious knowledge of electronics (e.g. schematics) and controlling the nanode requires programming knowledge. Although the Arduino platform is very well documented, not everything can be copied-and-pasted.

In the end of the day my team got the nanode working with a temperature sensor, CO2 sensor, CH4 (methane) sensor.

We took it outside and tested using Ed’s rental moped. We actually got results, but how accurate they were nobody knows.

So?

Although it is a really hard problem to solve in a low cost way. And it does seem there is still a long road ahead. Being able to measure air quality yourself is very powerful notion. The next step in citizenry and open data I reckon.

Want to know more? Follow the AirQualityEgg project.

Thanks to Ed Borden and all participants. I had a great time, learned new stuff, and made some new friends.