Collaborate Disseminate
New research from Pennsylvania State University has found that each of us is regularly producing our own personal cloud of pollutants, which actually affects indoor air quality. Don’t start sniggering and blaming the dog though – it’s not the… Continue reading Pig-Pen Effect: How our "personal pollution clouds" affect indoor air quality
Given that the World Health Organisation estimates that seven million premature deaths annually around the world are caused by air pollution, monitoring air quality is vital. There are already a number of methods employed to do just that, inc… Continue reading Nano-sensor in a streetlamp shines light on urban air pollution
The ESP8266 and its heavyweight sibling the ESP32 are fantastic boards to develop with as they allow you to quickly and easily get a project online. Just tack a few sensors and some LEDs on them, and you’re well on the way to producing your own “Internet of Things”. The …read more
Continue reading Building an Army of ESP32 Air Quality Sensors
Air quality has become an increasing concern in many urban areas, due to congestion and our ever-increasing energy use. While there are many organisations that task themselves with monitoring such data, it’s also something anyone should be able to take on at home. [Chrisys] is doing just that, with some …read more
Continue reading An Air Quality Monitor That Leverages the Cloud
The wildfires in California are now officially the largest the state has ever seen. Over 50,000 people have been displaced from their homes, hundreds are missing, and the cost in property damage will surely be measured in the billions of dollars when all is said and done. With a disaster of this scale just the immediate effects are difficult to conceptualize, to say nothing of the collateral damage.
While not suggesting their situation is comparable to those who’ve lost their homes or families, Electric Imp CEO [Hugo Fiennes] has recently made a post on their blog calling attention to the …read more
Continue reading The Electric Imp Sniffs out California Wildfires
Seniors and men are especially vulnerable to cognitive decline due to dirty air. Continue reading Air Pollution Can Make Us Dumber, Study Finds
To those of us in the corporate world, the conference room is where hope goes to die. Crammed into a space too small for the number of invitees, the room soon glows with radiated body heat and the aromas of humans as the time from their last shower gradually increases. To say it’s not a recipe for productivity is an understatement at best.
Having suffered through too many of these soporific situations, [Charles Ouweland] took matters into his own hands and built this portable air quality meter for meetings. With an OLED display on top and sensors inside, it displays …read more
Continue reading Monitoring Air Quality, One Sleepy Meeting At A Time
Having a mold problem in your home is terrible, especially if you have an allergy to it. It can be toxic, aggravate asthma, and damage your possessions. But let’s be honest, before you even get to those listed issues, having mold where you live feels disgusting.
You can clean it with the regular use of unpleasant chemicals like bleach, although only with limited effectiveness. So I was not particularly happy to discover mold growing on the kitchen wall, and decided to do science at it. Happily, I managed to fix my mold problems with a little bit of hacker ingenuity. …read more
Continue reading Hackers vs. Mold: Building a Humidistat Fan
When [James] moved to Lima, Peru, he brought his jogging habit with him. His morning jaunts to the coast involve crossing a few busy streets that are often occupied by old, smoke-belching diesel trucks. [James] noticed that his throat would tickle a bit when he got back home. A recent study linking air pollution to dementia risk made him wonder how cities could monitor air quality on a street-by-street basis, rather than relying on a few scattered stations. Lima has a lot of taxis, so why wire them up with sensors and monitor the air quality in real-time?
This taxi …read more
Continue reading Distributed Air Quality Monitoring via Taxi Fleet
If you live in a city with poor air quality you may be aware that particulates are one of the chief contributors to the problem. Tiny particles of soot from combustion, less than 10μm across, hence commonly referred to as PM10. These are hazardous because they can accumulate deep in the lungs, wherein all kinds of nasties can be caused.
There are commercial sensors available to detect and quantify these particles, but they are neither inexpensive nor open source. [Rundong] tells us about a project that aims to change that situation, the MyPart, which is described as a portable, accurate, …read more
Continue reading A Portable, Accurate, Low-Cost, Open Source Air Particle Counter