Episode: 3955
Title: HPR3955: airgradient measurement station
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3955/hpr3955.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 17:51:24

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3955 for Friday the 29th of September 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Irgradient Measurement Station.
It is hosted by Daniel Person and is about six minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Daniel Person talks about a hardware measurement station he's installed.
Hello, hackers and welcome to another podcast with Daniel.
And I'm going to talk about a bunch of different subjects and I'm doing like ShatGPT.
I'm really good at creating a bunch of words without any real knowledge behind them.
But the topics that I'm going to talk about are pretty random and I'm going to split them up.
Hi again and today I'm going to talk a little bit about Irgradient.
And this was another project that I ran through my vacation here when I bought this kind of small circuit board.
It is open source and all the different things are available online.
So you can actually download the circuitry and print it out yourself and then buy the different components
and put them on the board yourself.
All the code is open source and so on.
So what the project is, it's an air measurement.
So currently I have a lot of CO2 in here.
It's a thousand parts per million in here at the moment.
Usually I have 400 in here because I've been talking for a while.
It has gone up.
But it's not really that bad yet when I reach 2003,000.
I get a lot sleepy or at least 1500 is not good when I'm working.
So I'm trying to keep it below that.
And then we have this kind of measurements that measures larger particles in there.
So 2.5 particles.
Currently there are none in my air at the moment.
And these are like gas fumes and other heavy particles that you can measure.
And in my case I actually have an airport pretty close by and the planes go over my house.
And I was sitting here one evening and I had the door opened.
And I heard the plane going down and then I waited like through three minutes
and I saw that this measurement went over five micrograms per cube meters.
So something is going on with the airport airplane fumes that actually comes down.
And it was raining as well, perhaps it went down faster.
But it shows me that I can actually see when I get a lot of gas around me,
which is not healthy, of course.
And then it shakes temperature and it also shakes humidity.
So currently I have 64% humidity in here.
So very humid, but it's raining like crazy outside.
And it's going to be stormy today as well.
Currently I have 23.7 centigrade in here.
I'm not really sure about foreign height.
I guess it's around 80 or something like that.
So pretty hot.
So it's a really nice solution.
And I downloaded it or I bought it, downloaded a free software,
install it on my air gradient that I bought.
And then when I had it installed, I wanted to have the measurement.
So I can actually see them in a dashboard and follow them.
And as I'm already running my self-cluster with the Rafauna dashboard,
I wanted to put it into Grafona.
And Jeff Girling on YouTube had already done this project where he changed
and created something that could push data to per meters from this air gradient.
I didn't take his code, but they already have code in the open source software
where they are sending JSON data to their server.
And then they can make a dashboard for you.
So what I did was just change the server URL to my own server here
and then send the JSON data over there, reformatted it.
So I could actually fetch it from Prometheus.
And then I was up and running and could do my own dashboard
and follow what actually is happening in my environment here.
And I could have used Jeff Girling's code, of course,
and that would be the easy way of doing this.
But I wanted to learn, I wanted to figure out how it actually worked.
And I'm not really sure that he is actually running this same hardware as me.
So the sensors could have been incorrect.
And I could have code that didn't compile on my specific units and so on.
So doing it this way, I think was a bit safer.
And as I already have a bunch of servers running,
having one extra web server is the way I can send data through
isn't that much of an extra work for me.
But depending on what kind of solution you have,
you might want to use his code instead.
So if you are interested in your environment at home,
if you have a lot of extra,
if you have an extra code oxide in your environment
or something like that and you want to read that,
then I think this is a really good solution.
And you can actually keep track on how everything feels.
Currently it's up to 1200 ppm at the moment.
So I'm just going to record some small thing more
and then I need to open a door or something like that
in order to get some air in here
because it's going to get a lot of CO2 at the moment.
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