Spring Update
Over the past year, we’ve been overwhelmed by the demand for air quality monitoring. We are very proud of what we’ve accomplished–50 air quality monitors deployed at 13 sites throughout the Greater Baltimore area last fall, 30 updated air quality monitors this spring, over a dozen community meetings and presentations, and a website where anyone can view our data (http://bit.ly/bmoreopenair). This project is now one of the largest air quality monitoring efforts in the State of Maryland!
So out of our original aims, what did we accomplish?
Aim 1: We aim to use WeatherCubes, a low-cost environmental sensing station, to measure the effect of parks and green infrastructure on heat in Baltimore. We will build twenty WeatherCubes and deploy them around the city.
We built and deployed fifty WeatherCube monitoring stations around the greater Baltimore area, tested the technology, and showed that the monitors returned data and could provide accurate measurements. This project is now one of the largest air quality monitoring efforts in the State of Maryland!
Aim 2: Each station will contain several different temperature and humidity sensors, with different prices and precisions, to allow us to evaluate what level of data resolution and quality the WeatherCube can provide at varying price points.
Early in our development of the WeatherCube, we realized that reliable temperature and humidity monitoring requires redundancy of measurement. Further, we were aware of the need to minimize power consumption in order to meet our design requirement of continuous off-grid (solar-based) operation.
From the hundreds of commercial humidity and temperature sensors available from major electronics distributors, we narrowed our candidate sensor list down to six finalists. In the end, we selected two different sensors -- the HDC1080 from Texas Instruments and the SHT31 from Sensirion. These sensors are low-cost, high accuracy (+/- 2% relative humidity, and +/- 0.2C temperature), low-power, easily interfaced (via the popular I2C bus protocol) proved highly dependable in testing and production. One HDC1080 sensor is used in the WeatherCube (in the main compartment), and two SHT31 sensors are used (in the main compartment and in the air intake chamber). We note that Texas Instruments has recently developed several successors to the HDC1080, including the even smaller and more affordable HDC2010, which seem like promising solutions for a next iteration of the WeatherCube.
This approach will allow us to investigate how well the study questions can be answered by cheaper or more expensive sensors.
It is an exciting time to explore the world around us through physical computing! Environmental research questions that might be prohibitively expensive to address with conventional hardware can now be readily addressed with custom-built tools. For temperature and humidity monitoring, high-accuracy sensors that stand up to ambient environmental conditions can now be obtained for just a few dollars (the HDC2010 sensor, for example, is under $3 for one, and under $2 for a hundred). The hardware designs for the WeatherCube monitoring station are open source and provide a ready-made platform for conducting environmental monitoring experiments. We encourage you to reproduce and adapt these designs to address your own unique environmental monitoring needs.
Aim 3: At the end of the project, we will have a data set that will provide insight into how effectively greening initiatives cool Baltimore. This data will also help to refine the WeatherCube design.
This work is still on going but you can check out our website for yourself–go to http://bit.ly/bmoreopenair and check out the data we have available now. We’re still taking data so insights are still coming in- we’ll let you know as we go on!
So what’s next?
To continue our work providing affordable environmental monitoring, our team has started a company, Troposphere Monitoring (http://troposphe.re). We are excited to announce that we'll be joining the Techstars Impact Accelerator in Austin for the summer. If you're interested in keeping up with us during our time in Texas, you can follow us on twitter at https://twitter.com/TropoTweets or sign up for our mailing list at http://eepurl.com/drxu3r.
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