When I found out about this competition, I did a search to find similar projects and get ideas.
I soon discovered these two:
A community-led air quality sensing network that gives people a way to participate in the conversation about air quality
Smart Citizen is a platform to generate participatory processes of the people in the cities. Connecting data, people and knowledge, the objective of the platform is to serve as a node for building productive open indicators and distributed tools, and thereafter the collective construction of the city for its own inhabitants.
These projects go beyond the typical diy approach. They have designed something that can really scale, trying to build communities that crowdsource data for the common good. I really like this concept of community-diy, ie lets solve a big problem all together. In many countries (like Greece where I live) weather forecast and air quality information is kind of poor to say the least. Government’s environmental agencies do not deploy fancy/expensive equipment like rain radars, air pollution sensors in many locations etc, hence people do not have accurate weather forecasts, short term hyperlocal rain forecasts and other important air pollution information. With the evolution of technology, citizens can solve this problem on their own without government support. I guess thats the case with airqualityegg.com, smartcitizen.me and many other similar projects. Once sensor-locations become dence in an area area, and all data are open/shared on a common server, it should be feasible to radar-animation of pollution or rain in real time. This can be used as a basis for hyper local, short term forecasts and various other services e.g. receive an alert on your mobile phone that it will rain at your location in 5 minutes or have pollution alerting mechanisms for people with health conditions, etc.
Introducing Air ex Machina...
Outdoor unit:
The aim is to create a compact, battery powered weather & air quality station based on CC3200 & MSP430FR5969 utilizing various sensors like:
- Rain drops sensor (basic accuracy for low/high precipitation)
- Temperature/Humidity Sensor (DHT22)
- Grove - Air quality sensor
- NO2/CO Sensor (MICS-4514)
- Particle sensor (for dust or pollen)
- Ozone (O3) Sensor
- Volatile Organics (VoC) Sensor
- ...or maybe an Air Quality Egg shield or an Smart Citizen ambient board.
Sensor set A,B,C will be finalized during the project - agile/prototype approach.
This outdoor, battery powered unit will require a cleverly designed box to keep the electronics dry, but expose the sensors to the elements. I am going to place it on my flat’s balcony. Wifi will be used for communication with the indoor controller (beaglebone).
Indoor controller/gateway:
Beagleboard will be located inside the house, connected with some of the above sensors again, for comparing internal with external air quality. In addition I will have openhab running on beagleboard, and configure the http binding of openhab to consume a simple http API which will be exposed by the web-server of CC3200.
Having OpenHab as an integration platform, gateway and controller, is really useful for applying some automation in the house using the OpenHab rule engine, e.g. turn ventilation on/off when certain threshold on some sensors has been reached. Also openhab will provide a mobile user interface, as well an easy way to stream sensor data to a cloud server in real time via MQTT or HTTP. I will attempt air-control with rules and some “zwave” plugs or roller shutter in order to approach the use case of opening ventilation when it makes sense based on external temperature and air quality, and will try to deploy it in my house and see if its actually realistic to have it running.
Cloud backend:
I am looking forward connecting all these things to AirVantage and see what's possible in terms of data analytics/ user interface presentation / rule engine control, etc. However as I am an opensource advocate I will also attempt to connect my things to an open source platform that could form the basis of a backend system for a new crowdsourced environmental observations community as inspired by smartcitizen and the rest. I initially had http://nimbits.com in mind, but then I found this project http://www.sentilo.io which seems even better suited, so I will give it a try, deploy it and connect my things with it through OpenHab.Will also need an MQTT broker like HiveMQ to have multiple backend systems running. Of course all these cloud stuff make more sense if/once more people join the project and share their data. It would be cool, if other in-the-air competitors are interested to connect their sensors also to my backend once it’s online :-)
But first, lets play with TI's launchpads...
>>Link to next post: #02 LaunchPad cc3200 first play
