Arduino code
Particulate matters are one of the most important issues on air quality, creating health problems and dangerously increasing mortality. Air quality monitoring systems currently operated by government agencies span a rather sparse network and try to capture the image for larger areas using predictive models that often fail to reflect local conditions or the temporal evolution of phenomena distant from the location of the stations. The need for a more informed society on the quality of its environment and the spread of the Internet of Things has led to the implementation of low-cost monitoring systems that can be easily applied to public buildings and the urban fabric and provide a reliable and true depiction of reality, with data open to all and accessible in real time. These systems provide the ability for participatory air quality monitoring, with some of these having already world-wide implementations, where anyone interested can build a monitoring device and offer his data to the community in an open framework. The open bet is the reliability and precision of the measurements provided by the low-cost PM2.5 and PM10 particle sensors, with a lot of projects examining this subject.
This Arduino sketch that I made for my diploma thesis programs the Blend Micro microcontroller to initiate the sensors DHT22 and Nova PM SDS011 and transfer the readings via Bluetooth Low Energy to a device that uses the PM_Sensor app. During this thesis, software and hardware were implemented for this purpose, while utilizing data from the PatrasAir and hackAIR platforms on air quality in cities in Greece.