Sensing Umbrella Checks Air Quality #WearableWednesday

Umbrellas are taking on more responsibilities these days. Along with protecting people from weather, they can now measure levels of air quality, protecting people from pollution. Well, as long as you have a “Sensing Umbrella”, like the one developed by a team of students at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID). The class was led by the awesome duo — Massimo Banzi (Arduino) and Giorgio Olivero (TODO Design).

The class goal was to envision, design and implement interactive objects that are open and connected, whose design and behavior can be used to sense, read and affect the domestic landscape or other shared environments.

The Sensing Umbrella is the perfect Arduino project, with its ability to gather and share pollution levels such as carbon monoxide and nitrogen dixoide. Not only can it contribute this data to pollution databases, but it can also visualize this data through LEDs to people on the street. This is real-time data that is time-stamped, geo-located and then uploaded into the cloud. I don’t know if the team members found the cloud metaphor as interesting as I did, but congratulations to Simon Herzog, Saurabh Datta and Akarsh Sanghi for a meaningful look at air quality.

If you have an interest in LED umbrellas, you may want to check out our FLORAbrella tutorial. Once you’ve got that figured out, you could contemplate adding our Temperature and Humidity Sensor. Send us a pic when you are done!


Flora breadboard is Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!


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