The Hidden Cost of Air Quality Monitors

• openaq.org

  7 31 8.7 HTML

  The OpenAQ website

  

We are currently integrating our data with openAQ [1] and then people can opt in to share data with openAQ and many map applications use that data.

[1] https://openaq.org/

• purpleair2mqtt

  2 3 2.9 Go

  Pull sensor data from your local PurpleAir sensors and publish it - no cloud needed.

They may be referring to the changes to PurpleAir API [0] that introduces paid requests that you can rip through quickly when doing large scale analysis.

In the United States, AirNow.gov includes most PurpleAir sensors, although they are annotated differently than “higher quality” sensors (I was going to say than government sensors, but here in Connecticut, the state has a number of PurpleAir monitors deployed and rapidly deployed more when stuff got bad due to Canadian wildfires a few weeks ago).

Fortunately, for local users, you can hit your own sensor and grab the data however often you want. I even wrote a tool to help out and drop it into influxdb and post it to MQTT[1]. They still support local fetching of data. However, many default integrations from tools like Home Assistant could be affected as they use the cloud integration.

[0] https://community.purpleair.com/t/api-pricing/4523

[1] https://github.com/pridkett/purpleair2mqtt

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• community-airmonitor

  2 12 5.6 Vue

  Miller Beach / NWI air quality monitor using PurpleAir PM sensor, tracking PM2.5, PM10, weather, traffic congestion, trains in "The Region", etc. built in node.js/express.js, updated every 15 minutes.

I run a lil air quality sensor in the Miller neighbourhood of Gary, IN. I started off with a PurpleAir II, then higher tech monitor from AQMesh for a few months, and now I operate another higher tech monitor from a local company in Valparaiso, IN called Sensit Technologies, which they generously donated.

I also operate a AIS boat tracker from FleetMon. I did track aircraft flying to/from ORD/MDW/GYY, and also the local train operator SouthShore line have an open API (I wish the other tracks, Norfolk Southern, would have an API!)

I built a crappy lil frontend/api using Express and do plan to continue to work on it and track more stuff, hopefully more people with use it. Hopefully it convinces some more citizen scientists to run their own (bring your own cloud & hardware)

https://millerbeach.community

It's actually had a lot of visits recently due the the BP oil refinery leaking SO2 after a recent storm [1], and now the Canadian wildfires bringing that PM our way, our air quality is the worst it's been since I've started to track it.

I was hoping to figure out how to turn the years of data into an infographic, or use AI to digest the data and generate a bunch of useful data points/stats. If anyone knows of an easy way, rather than creating the queries by hand!

https://github.com/kingsloi/community-airmonitor

[1] https://abc7chicago.com/sulfur-smell-indiana-bp-refinery-whi...

• bondhome

  1 1 7.5 Shell

  bondhome.io command line actions via curl

Is there a way to get air quality via an api in the US that doesn't require api keys? weather.gov is one example of what I'm sorta looking for. I have a shell script [1] that gets weather and solar radiation from free and open APIs. Adding in some sort of air quality index would be great.

[1] https://github.com/mikecarper/bondhome/blob/main/weather.sh

Suggest a related project