Hey folks
Sam the ‘air apparent’ guy that does the air sensors in Bristol is running 2 workshops one in Bath on 11th Jan (12-3pm) and another in Bristol 25th Jan
Any takers? I’m aiming to goto Bath one…
Danny
I should think I can do the Bath one. Car share?
Update on these workshops:
The Bristol one is already full, so no spaces for us.
Not totally clear about the Bath one (tomorrow!), but the booking form is still accepting bookings: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/community-workshop-build-air-pollution-monitors-for-bath-tickets-84546527941?utm_term=eventurl_text
I’ve booked a couple of spaces for Ed and myself, and contacted the organiser to see if it’s OK for us to go (it’s advertised as a Bath community thing). Sounds possible there might not be enough parts for us to make a sensor, but I’d be interested to go anyway, to see what’s what and have a chat to Sam. @p.j I think you were potentially interested in coming? I’ll let you know if/what I hear back from the organisers, but if you do want to come it would be worth booking another place – tickets are free, you just pay £30 if you make a sensor.
I missed this post, just been silly-busy - and it’s too late to make it today.
Will have to catch up on Wednesday.
So, @Al_B and I went to the Bath session today: 2 hours, upstairs in a pub, around 30 people attending, but just 8 kits available. It went well and was very worthwhile. It was hosted by Bath XR, led by Sam of Air Apparent, and had presence from us, from XR people, Transition Bath, Bath:Hacked, and private citizens, and maybe more.
The first 40 mins were a useful not-over-technical orientation on why to monitor air quality, and how, and plently of Q&A about that and about the sensors. Then each group of 4 or so built a kit from parts, with some printed instructions and with Sam providing assistance where needed.
The building was really just a plugging together - not difficult for someone familiar with this sort of thing - and a little tying together with zip ties. Every table got finished in the time, which was pretty generous if you had a technical person in the team.
The final part of the build is to stuff three tied boards into the pair of elbow pipes: the width of the main sensor board is just right to make a snug fit, so we can see why these pipes are an ideal solution to weatherproofing.
The firmware had already been loaded, so all we needed to do was connect to the device’s wifi to give it the local wifi setup, and power cycle it. When it power cycles, it either successfully connects to the configured local wifi, or it offers an access point to be (re)configured.
Once connected to the world, it immediately starts posting data every few minutes, and we were able to see that data published on the web. Evidently the firmware is already configured to phone home (to Germany?)
It was helpful that one of our team had brought a laptop, for power, and another of us had a phone that could offer a wifi hotspot. The laptop’s browser was rather more able to read off the posted data than the phone’s browser.
One of our number, a Bath resident not living in a listed building, took the sensor, and paid for it. (That’s the format: Sam pre-buys the bits, makes them up into kits, people build them, pay for it, and take away the finished device. Hopefully they then enrol in the luftdaten project and set their sensor location for mapping purposes.)
The online instruction manual has links to the sensor data sites: list, 1, 2, 3. And this is the live map data from our sensor.
It felt to us that we should surely have an event in Frome, with as many citizens as might be interested, and preferably as many kits of parts as we can pre-purchase. There might not be enough kits, but that should be fine, as people will be learning the principles and seeing how easy it is to get started, and how very helpful we are.
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Great write up Ed! Glad you guys went. Did you get any photos?? Interested to hear more when we speak next