CONA - Community Observation Networks for Air

A place to keep cows, but that's not important right now (if you need help with the reference ... see here ) By Worldview999 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons In atmospheric science we're always looking to have information about the vertical structure of the atmosphere. We can deploy weather stations to measure the wind speed and direction but we're always missing what's going on in the air above us. Of course there are ways to get information from higher in the air and we'll be using one of those in this project (helikite) which we'll cover when it's operating in Rangiora but now I'd like to talk about another piece of kit that we have deployed in the town. A Ceilometer . Ceilometers are intended to measure the ceiling , which means the height of the lowest cloud. These sensors send a light pulse and measure its reflection from clouds and aerosol layers to obtain this height. Ceilometer installed near the AWS site in Rangiora. Photo by Sa...

Here is PACMAN in its native environment One of the key pieces of hardware we're deploying in this campaign is our PACMAN ( Particles, Activity and Context Measurement Autonomous Node ) ... not this pac-man . This little unit is capable of logging air quality parameters (dust concentrations, $CO_2$, $CO$), activity information (motion, distance to closest object) and context (time, temperature) every second. We expect to use this information to estimate what drives the indoor concentrations of dust in homes. All the participants that want to have instruments in their home will have one of these units installed but before we can do that we need to test if they are working as expected. So, we set them up in a bench facing a wall for a few days and as it is normal with experimental technology, not all of them worked perfectly but most of them did so we are go for PACMAN deployment. If you're curious as to what the data looks like ... here is a link to the test results of one of...

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...