Inspiration
Air Pollution is becoming an ever more important problem, affecting every part of our society, from young children with respiratory problems, to the elderly with the cardio-vascular related diseases. Moreover, as our industries grow, we produce more and more of the health-threatening chemicals and so it is important, now more than ever, to measure the air pollution around us and provide guidance and assistance when it is healthy to go outdoors, and when it is better to stay inside.
What it does
The AirPeng project is all about making sure that people are aware of the air quality in their surroundings. To make that possible, we created our very own black box, fully equipped 7 segments display, LED matrix, buzzer air quality sensors. This device allows the users to check the air quality of their environment throughout the day, and encourages them to adopt the safest behaviour in case of an unhealthy atmosphere: feel free to go outside when the air quality is good, but don’t when the pollution is high enough to become harmful to your health. On top of that, the device is linked to Alexa, which means that the users can directly ask Alexa about the CO2 or NO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Alexa can also give audible warnings in case of dangerous levels of air pollution. When the device collects air quality data from users’ environments, the aim is also to collect it and join it with other users’ data in order to produce meaningful and insightful interactive dashboards. These could then be used by official organisations like governmental or environment committees in order to solve air pollution problems in areas that need it the most.
How we built it
We first focused on understanding the Arduino functionalities and connected the LEDs with the motherboard so that the desired information was broadcasted on our displays. Next, we started crafting the box in which we wanted to package our hardware solution, for which we rapidly learnt how to use the laser cutter. Once the box was constructed, we focused on developing an Alexa skill using ASK so that a real-time assistant could be introduced into our software solution. As the last step we implemented a dashboard where data from various boxes will be aggregated and visualised.
Challenges we ran into
Our biggest challenge was our use of hardware, as none of us had ever worked with an Arduino or electronics before. Another challenge was sharing the workload when we only have a single piece of hardware, we managed to overcome this by splitting into work-streams that we could work on in parallel.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud that we have managed to create a piece of hardware that can display numbers and small images in an 8x8 LED Matrix. We also managed to accomplish a final product that feels professional and clean throughout, from the hardware product, to a immersive and branded dashboards to show related data.
What we learned
How to use and programme hardware components and integrate them with other software units. We learnt some basics of data analysis and data preparation, as well as how to visualise it in the an efficient manner. Moreover, we learnt how to use new APIs which none of us has come across before, such as the Alexa API and the OpenWeather API.
What's next for AirPeng
Next up we hope to improve upon our design, using cheaper, more specialised components. We also hope to set up the API functionality to collate the pollution data we collect from all AirPeng boxes to display in our website for everyone's benefit, even if they don't own a box.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.