Using Taxies and Raspberry Pi to Monitor Air Quality in Peru! #Raspberrypi

Via Raspberrypi.org

When James Puderer moved to Lima, Peru, his roadside runs left a rather nasty taste in his mouth. Hit by the pollution from old diesel cars in the area, he decided to monitor the air quality in his new city using Raspberry Pis and the abundant taxies as his tech carriers.

Sensing air quality in Lima

Luckily for James, almost all taxies in Lima are equipped with the standard hollow vinyl roof sign seen in the video above, which makes them ideal for hacking.

Using a Raspberry Pi alongside various Adafuit tech including the BME280 Temperature/Humidity/Pressure Sensor and GPS Antenna, James created a battery-powered retrofit setup that fits snugly into the vinyl sign.

With the onboard tech, the device collects data on longitude, latitude, humidity, temperature, pressure, and airborne particle count, feeding it back to an Android Things datalogger. This data is then pushed to Google IoT Core, where it can be remotely accessed.

Next, the data is processed by Google Dataflow and turned into a BigQuery table. Users can then visualize the collected measurements. And while James uses Google Maps to analyse his data, there are many tools online that will allow you to organise and study your figures depending on what final result you’re hoping to achieve.

See links to the complete build process!


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