Deep Ocean to Deep Space

Getting started on measuring air quality. January 5, 2021

September 2020

Back in the summer I came across a Citizens Science project on SciStarter for building a low cost Air Quality Monitor that measures dust, particles in the air. Indoor air quality has been a concern of mine for a while, both my wife and I suffer allergic reactions to dust and dust mites. And we have a cat who now has to be on some rather strong meds for the rest of his life to keep his allergies under control. He has gone through many tests, all negative, except the one that is hard to test for, dust.

And then the fires got going in the west and my daughter is in the Bay Area with her family. I came across the PurpleAir web site that sells at a reasonable cost air quality monitors that connect to the cloud via Wi-Fi and contribute to a national database of air quality readings you can see on their web site.

And I found AirNow.gov, our government’s air quality site that now also shows wild fires along with Air Quality Index (AQI). Can I contribute to that? Not sure, but the first thing is getting a sensor on my own. Measuring our indoor AQI might help us see what we are doing that either hurts or help Loki and his sneezes and I can contribute to to a better map of pollution across the country, like I do for precipitation measurement to CoCoRahs.

(BTW: Cats have very tiny sinus passages that clog up easy making them very susceptible to sinus infections that can make them very ill. Therefore preventing those is a top priority to us, been through it before. )

I attended a webinar on SciStarter with the developer of the CanAir project in Borgata, Columbia. It was well done, and The Zoom was with us, most of the time, considering the distance. They have two versions, and focus is on a portable device that connect to your phone via Bluetooth that then connects to their cloud. The idea seems to be that you can carry with you on your bike (you are riding a bike, right) and log areas of particle pollution as you travel

There is good information on their project page and links to hackster.io for details. One version involves soldering components, the other uses project boards, and there is a list of materials and links to the software and the app for your phone.

More on the search for parts next time.