from Hacker News

Build an Air Quality Monitor with InfluxDB, Grafana and Docker on a Raspberry Pi

by alexandros on 3/27/19, 10:46 PM with 67 comments

• by betimsl on 3/28/19, 10:07 AM

  Measuring a sensor is so complicated...Influx, Grafana and Docker is not enough. You may want to throw in AWS, some Google API and not to forget: Tensorflow. A pinch of opencv with GPU support might make it real software. Cross compile all this for windows that runs on RPi so corporate clients can trust it -- because buying a license always reflects seriousness.

• by zensavona on 3/28/19, 9:25 AM

  Probably want to add a PM (particulate matter) sensor to the mix.

  I've built a few similar devices using ESP chips and various laser dust sensors, highly recommend the Plantower PMS5003 - laser defraction, PM1-PM10 accuracy, ~$20 and there are good libraries available on GitHub for interacting with it.

  Edit: https://twitter.com/zensavona/status/1091949965306257409

• by Animats on 3/28/19, 7:47 AM

  What's impressive is that you can get a sensor for temperature, air pressure, "air quality", and humidity for $12.80 in quantity 1. "Air quality" is strange. It measures volatile organic components, not CO, CO2, or particulates. Sensors for those cost much more. So this is measuring what's easy to measure, not what's useful for, say, HVAC control.

  8GB and Docker, plus a "cloud" server, seems a bit much.

• by wuyishan on 3/28/19, 6:53 AM

  A similar, yet completely different project: https://luftdaten.info/en/home-en/ Can be seen as a "worldwide crowd sourced air quality measurement projects using cheap DIY sensor/data collector"

• by Uhhrrr on 3/28/19, 1:48 AM

  The Docker part seems thoroughly unnecessary.

• by TheSpiceIsLife on 3/28/19, 8:30 AM

  I'm curious to hear from anyone who runs air quality monitors at home: how has knowledge of the quality of the air in your house affected your behaviour?

  My house is 56 years old. I'm guessing the kitchen upgrade is at least 5 years old. The carpet is probably at least a 5 years old. There isn't much fresh paint in here.

  Am I about right to assume I probably don't have much in the way off off-gassing from anything in here, or does carpet / furniture / melamine continually off-gas for it's entire life?

  Anyway, I've got some idea that CO2 buildup is a thing, and humidity, and off-gassing, so... I tend to ventilate the house frequently even during winter. Even when it's -5 outside, I'll occasionally open one or more windows / doors and turn the kitchen exhaust fan on in order to draw fresh air in and across the house. I'll also occasionally open multiple doors / windows for 10 minutes or so in an effort to replace the majority of the air in the house.

  I tend to eschew yet-another-device that needs maintenance / power / charging / monitoring / fiddling because I tend to do a lot of that at work and would rather just come home and not-have-to-maintain-another-97-machines.

  So I'm interested in the on average / sort of good enough / sometimes over-shoot-the-mark behavioural changes that would result if I did have air quality monitors.

• by pookieinc on 3/28/19, 8:55 AM

  We've been on the hunt for the most accurate Air Quality Monitor since we've just moved to the Middle East and have had a really tough time finding something accurate. Aside from building one and having it receive questionable ratings, does anyone have any suggestions on a super reliable machine they've been happy with that has proven its accuracy in some way?

• by djhworld on 3/28/19, 1:10 PM

  Has anyone been running this in the field for a few months/weeks.

  I'm wondering how the SD card gets on with the constant writes into InfluxDB (assuming the samplesa are taken frequently)

• by shawnps on 3/28/19, 4:37 AM

  If you're interested in purchasing an air quality monitor, Awair is nice:

  https://getawair.com/

  I learned about it from DHH's talk on air quality:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRqh8oLY7Ik

• by bayesian_horse on 3/28/19, 7:14 AM

  I'm working on similar things, and at the moment I prefer Redis and Postgres. Redis just got streams, a bit like Kafka, and Postgres has extensions for timeseries.

• by gpm on 3/28/19, 2:46 AM

  What do people think about the recommended sensor?

  Is it reasonably accurate? Are there better alternatives?

• by bugsense on 3/28/19, 9:59 AM

  Ditch Grafana+Influx for Netdata and you are golden :)