hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1579.txt

Episode: 1579
Title: HPR1579: Crowd Sourced Air Quality Monitoring
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1579/hpr1579.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:14:30

---

This episode of HBR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15.
That's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's Aniston Fair at AnanasThost.com.
I'm a PhD student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
I have a couple of different things that I work on.
These range from projects over in Uganda and Haiti, also centered around air quality,
to actually working on these sensors and also working on different sensors or different,
basically algorithms to take very large amounts of data and process that efficiently.
Okay, so what's the name of this device?
This device is called the spec.
Spec.
Yes, basically we're trying to get at the idea of sort of small low-cost devices that we can scatter
around, kind of like you would scatter dust almost, and it sort of breaks the typical way of
sensing as like having air quality that's only measured in like one or two places around a city,
to being able to basically put one in every home.
So you're sort of crowd sourcing air quality?
Right, right.
So, okay, I'm going to describe it since it's on the radio and people don't know what I'm
looking at. It's a small black box with a little screen, and I guess it's color coding
the different air quality. So what are the different color codes that you get on this thing?
Well right now, this is sort of a prototype, so we have a scale of values that aren't yet correlated
to a specific reading. But basically we've taken readings in a few different places, and
what we have here is the colors basically indicate whether or not there's a high concentration
of particulate matter or a low concentration of particulate matter. It doesn't necessarily tell
you whether or not the air is safe to breathe, but particulate matter is a really good measure
for basically figuring out whether or not other harmful things might be present.
And I see that there's, I mean like if you look at at the right angle, there's like a graph or
something on the front that it's taking what's all that data, and where does that data go?
I'm assuming it could pipe out to your computer in the portal.
So the graph on the front of the screen is basically the past hour of data.
What this will let you do is basically see the recent trends in air quality.
One hour of data is kind of helpful to look at right away, because it can tell you,
for example, if you cooked dinner, did that significantly increase the
amount of particulate? Now it does store all of that data internally, and when you plug it into
your computer via USB cable, we have an uploader that uploads that to basically a central database,
so that you can review all of the data that you've collected in your home over time.
So what you said earlier when we were talking that it's pretty much all custom hardware,
like what are some of the things that go into making something like that?
So the core of the unit is a small inexpensive dust sensor. The dust sensor itself costs about
$2, and typically you find them in air purifiers and things like that,
basically so that they just switch on when the air quality gets really bad.
Now what we're actually using is a custom microcontroller to take that sensor data,
to take basically an arm chip and an algorithm that we're in the process of developing,
and take the fairly low resolution data that we're getting out of that,
and basically use a combination of statistics and machine learning to estimate the data
with a higher fidelity that we can get straight out of the sensor.
Okay, so the whole thing is running some kind of embedded system,
like an old PSD or an X or something, and we might, is that what you guys program,
or what is the brain of this thing with?
I mean, the brain of the thing is embedded, it's all inside,
but right now it's just basically running some low-level C code.
It doesn't really need anything fancier than that.
The whole thing is fairly low power, which helps to basically contribute to the low cost of the
device. Is it actually powered by USB right now? That's correct, it's just powered by a standard
USB cable. Okay, so the end goal, I guess, is to get a device like this in a lot of people's phones,
so that you can get an idea of the air quality. What, to what end, why do people need to know that,
or is it just for informational purposes, or can it contribute to something larger where maybe
you monitor an area? Well, there's a lot of reasons why people might or ought to
care about air quality. These range from, say, wondering why your child has asthma attacks and
trying to pinpoint the causes of that, to, say, wondering if the power plant or the drilling
site down the street is basically like blowing particles into your home when the wind blows
the right way. The trick about air quality is that air is clear unless it's like really bad,
and there's like smoke, but for the most part, you don't really have a good way of intuitively
knowing what the air quality is. Right now, the sensors that are available are all really expensive,
and the ones that basically have publicly available data, more often than not, these are on the
tops of buildings and such, so it's actually above all of the air that people are actually breathing.
And because air quality is sort of naturally continuous, what we really need is a lot of monitors,
not just a few, we need a lot spread out so that we can actually start to see sort of the dynamics
of the air quality in a specific area. The best place to go right now is CMUCreateLab.org.
That's the website for the CreateLab, which stands for Community Robotics, Education,
and Technology Empowerment, and that site will have information about the spec, which is the
air quality monitor, as well as a bunch of our other projects as well, so. Is it like open
the source? Can people start hacking on your code if they want to help? So our lab is sort of unique
and that we have a policy that anything that we work on is open source. Our philosophy right now
is that we basically want to get this stuff out there so that it helps people, and if there's
someone else that can come along and help us improve on that, that's all the better. We totally
welcome that. What's your name again? My name is Mike Taylor. Cool, thanks a lot for talking to me. All right, thank you.
You've been listening to HECCA Public Radio at HECCA Public Radio.org. We are a community podcast
network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday. Today's show, like all our shows,
was contributed by an HBR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording a podcast,
then click on our contributing to find out how easy it really is. HECCA Public Radio was founded
by the digital dog pound and the Infonomicon Computer Club, and it's part of the binary
revolution at binrev.com. If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly,
leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself. Unless otherwise status,
today's show is released on the creative comments, attribution, share a life, 3.0 license.