CONA - Community Observation Networks for Air

Hopefully something more substantial than the fox! ... ( that song is still in my head after I let my kids get their hands on the radio!) [EDIT: Added missing link to full analysis script] Let's talk ODIN then ... Now that we have more data from the ODINs we can start to build answers to the questions: How uniform is the air pollution field in Rangiora? Is the plume of emissions recirculated under certain conditions? But there is a big caveat. The ODINs do not give us $PM_{10}$ and it cannot be directly compared to the measurements done by ECan. So ... let's dive in ... carefully. First, let's review where we installed the ODINs. Our original intention was to locate them in two west-to-east lines, one to the north of the town and another one to the south. We were fortunate to be able to use lamp posts for our deployments and Sally and Sam managed to get them pretty close to where we wanted them. This map shows the location of ECan's air quality stati...

If you remember , we had some troubles with our outdoor sensors last week and one of them is still in pieces in our bench and the sledgehammer looks very tempting at this stage! I think that the rest of the units heard the message and are now behaving better . However, we're not entirely happy as a large peak in $PM_{10}$ concentrations observed on the night of the 11th of August was not captured by any of our units. Unfortunately we didn't get good weather (too warm) last week to test for another large peak in concentrations so we deployed the ODINs to their target locations last Friday and I'll be very busy looking at the data when we have the first download this coming Friday... stay tuned.

On Tuesday I told you about the tests of our PACMAN units before they were being deployed in our volunteers' homes. Now is the turn of ODIN (Outdoor Dust Information Node). A little bit of history ... After the first PACMAN deployments we realised that we needed to have information from the outside of the home as well as the inside so we developed a stripped down version of PACMAN focusing solely on the dust measurements. Here you can see a presentation we gave about the ODIN after the very first tests.   Now, we have six ODINs to be deployed in Rangiora but before we go ahead and distribute them across the town we need to know that they are working fine so we set all of them up at ECan's air quality station in Rangiora. For this test we're looking for indications that the units are recording all the data, that the temperature looks plausible and that the dust sensors respond to something other than temperature. In simple terms, we're looking for plots t...

That's a trick question, I haven't told you what ODINs are! Well, ODIN stands for O utdoor D ust I nformation N ode and it is the name of our low-cost outdoor dust sensor. You may ask why not calling it "low-cost outdoor sensor" to which I would respond: for the same reason that Apple doesn't call their phones "high-cost shiny communication devices". A lot goes in a name and I believe that for a project to be successful it needs a good name. So, as strange as it sounds, we have a Norse god gathering data for us. The sensors themselves are rather simple. At the heart of the ODIN is an optical dust sensor that, together with a temperature and relative humidity sensor and a clock send data to a microcontroller which saves it on a micro-SD card. The ODIN is battery operated and it can run unattended for two months on a full 6Ah LiPo battery. Simplified schematics of ODIN (left) and an actual ODIN (right) with its internal components visible. A more in depth...