Planet Arduino

According to [Dr. Tom Lehrer’s] song Pollution, “Wear a gas mask and a veil. Then you can breathe, long as you don’t inhale!” While the air quality in most of the world hasn’t gotten that bad, there is a lot of concern about long-term exposure to particulates in the air causing health problems. [Ashish Choudhary] married an Arduino with a display and a pollution sensor to give readings of the PM2.5 and PM10 levels in the air.

The sensor uses a laser diode and a photodiode to detect and count particles, while a fan moves air through the system. If you aren’t up on pollution metrics, PM2.5 is a count of very fine particles (under 2.5 microns) and PM10 is a count of particles for 10 microns. You can find a datasheet for the device online.

One thing to note is that the sensor has a finite lifespan. The datasheet claims “up to” 8,000 hours. If you ran the sensor continuously that’s not quite a year, so you might want to be judicious about how often you light up the device.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this particular sensor. If you want to find the exact source of a pollutant, consider this build.

Once in a while, South East Asia countries such as Singapore and Malaysia suffers from the haze, a fire-related large-scale air pollution problem that occurs regularly. Especially during dry season there are some persisting forest fires in Indonesia that spread to other countries nearby.

In 2015 the haze hit Singapore quite badly, causing schools to close down for one day. That’s why during Hyper Haze Hackathon taking place in Singapore, Tian Lye Teo and Ethan Lee Yong Sheng worked on and presented a low-cost solution based on Arduino Uno to tackle difficulty to communicate haze rising to illiterate elderly in the nation and won second prize !

Here’s how the two creators described the project:

The main problem we are trying to address is to help the elderly who are living alone in Singapore during the haze period. There are several factors that make this a suitable source of information for them. While the PSI* reading are widespread, they might not be accessible to these elders (no cellphone, TV, radio) or they do not understand the mainstream languages used by our medium (Chinese, English etc).

Furthermore, the PSI reading comes with 2 sets of readings (3hr and 24 hrs) and it is confusing to them what need to be done when PSI reached a certain number (“200 already? so what? aiyo… looks clear lei”).

The solution we came up with is this inexpensive Arduino device that fetch current PSI reading from a server. With the reading, the device will point at one of the five indicators that ranges from don’t need to “wear mask” to “die die cannot go out’.

The device actually cost about 20 dollars to build and implementation is ideally done at home. However, we understand that elders would not pay for this (“20 dollars?! I can eat 5 days meals with this”). We are hoping we can get in touch with some organisation(perhaps the govt) to install this at either the lift lobby at every floor or at the ground floor. We believe that even at its current stage, it is still very useful for the elders.

The ideal grand plan we had for this is to be able to link this to the pioneer generation card and from there, dispense a mask for the elder so that they can travel safe (something we felt the govt might help)

Please help spread this by sharing it and hopefully someone can help us achieve this little wish of two guys trying to give back to the pioneer generation who helped built the nation

*PSI (Pollutant Standards Index) is an index to provide  understandable information about daily levels of air quality and it’s the indicator used in Singapore to show how bad the haze is. The monitoring stations measure concentration levels of particulate matter (PM₁₀), fine particulate matter (PM_2.5), sulphur dioxide (SO₂), nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), ozone (O₃), and carbon monoxide (CO). All of them determine the level of PSI.

After Anywhere, Turbo-gusli and Solaris, Dmitry Morozov shared with us Digioxide, a new interactive work using Arduino Nano, hc-06 bluetooth module, gas and dust sensors, LG mobile printer :

This project aims to raise public awareness of the environmental pollution by artistic means.
Digioxide is a portable wireless device equipped with sensors of air pollution gases and dust particles that is connected to computer via bluetooth. This allows a person with digioxide to freely move around a city, seek out ecologically problematic places and turn their data into digital artworks.

The information about the concentration of dust and harmful gases, such as CO, CO2, HCHO, CH4 and C3H8 and spme others is algorithmically transformed into generative graphics, forming an abstract image. The device’s mobile printer allows instant printing of this air “snapshot” that can be left as an evidence on the place, or given as a present to a passerby.

The Sensing Umbrella is the second project I’m featuring on this blog (see the first), coming out of the class at  the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design called Connected Objects, with Massimo Banzi and Giorgio Olivero. 

The project created by a team of students Akarsh Sanghi, Saurabh Datta and Simon Herzog is a platform to gather, display, and share hyperlocal air pollution data:

Each umbrella serves as a node for measuring CO and NO2 pollution levels and can provide exceptionally granular data to pollution databases and for scientific analysis. Simultaneously, the light visualisations inside the umbrella respond to pollution levels in real time and spread awareness of air quality in the city for its inhabitants. The umbrella uses open hardware and software to gather and interpret data through a built-in sensor array, displays CO and NO2 pollution locally in two modes, and logs the timestamped and geolocated data to the cloud for analysis.

Check the video to watch the team introducing the project:

[Anirudh] and his friends were sitting around reminiscing about India. In particular, they recalled riding around in auto-rickshaws in stifling heat, watching their skin turn black from the exhaust. They started thinking about all of the soot and pollution in crowded cities the world over and wondered whether the stuff could be re-purposed for something like printer ink. That’s how they came up with their soot/pollution printer.

They created a soot-catching pump which they demonstrate with a burning candle. The pump mixes the soot particles with rubbing alcohol and an oil substrate and sends the ink to an HP C6602 inkjet cartridge. They used [Nicolas C Lewis]‘s print head driver shield for Arduino to interface with the cartridge, turning it into a 96dpi printing head that uses only five pins.

[Anirudh] and his friends plan to design a carbon separator using charged plates to capture the soot particles from pollution sources and filter out dust. Be sure to check out their demonstration video after the jump.

Update: In response to [Hirudinea]‘s comment about mining the carbon from cars, [Anirudh] is now looking for collaborators (tinkerers, filmmakers, DIY enthusiasts) to move forward with the idea of re-purposing carbon. Email him at anirudhs@mit.edu.

http://vimeo.com/87233029