Polludron V1
Last updated
Last updated
The AQI measured through Air Q monitoring stations across the city proved the point that the air quality level was deteriorating at an alarming rate and necessary steps needed to be taken to curb it. The citizens needed to be more concerned about the environment of the city. But, unfortunately there was no open platform where the citizens could visit to check the air quality of their area. Citizens would only be concerned about the environment if they realised how polluted their environment was. The prime motive was to create a visualisation tool that would collect the AQI data and present it in the form of Smart reports for the citizens to be aware about Air quality of Delhi.
EMK, stands for "Environment Monitoring Kit". It is a small, custom designed hardware which is equipped with different kinds of sensors that can assess various parameters of the environment. The device requires to be mounted on a wall in a semi-open space and can transmit environmental data consistently to the assigned servers through its GPRS or Wifi capabilities. The interesting aspect of EMK is that unlike the huge devices being currently used by the state regulators, EMK is much smaller in size and easily scalable due to its minimum requirements. As a result, the device can be deployed in multiple different locations across Delhi having distinct demographic characteristics. The device, however, requires some calibration in terms of the unit of measurement for the specific parameters of environment as the sensors provide data only in parts per million (ppm).
This cover was selected and used for all the devices that were deployed in different parts of Delhi. Although the issue of machines dying was not properly resolved, however, the rate of failure declined considerably
The timeline and budget was the biggest constraint was the biggest challenge while executing the entire project. The Idea was to deploy 40 kits in Delhi before Fab'2015 to capture data during odd-even. It was not possible to go for conventional manufacturing process like injection molding as it was quite expensive. There was also not enough time for designing and developing PCBs for the kit. so we decided to mount the entire kit on MDF and it worked.
With this project, we got in depth feedback on how sensors behave in ambient condition. Also we identified various sensor technologies and sensor manufactures around the world which helped us to identify right sensors for the Version two. Few tampering attempts also helped us in designing enclosure for the next upgrade.
The open environment platform became good start point for Oizom analytics platform which further upgraded into Oizom terminal. The entire project most importantly became a good reason to form a passionate team who wanted to do good work.
The enclosure is a simple vacuum formed casing made out of ABS with Acrylic net on the bottom . Decision of making use of compressed plastic as it not only was cost-efficient but also provided enough room for easy installation of the components and that too properly. It even offered room to install a small solar panel as well as protection from rain due to its slanted design from the top. The cover however was not good in enough in terms of resistance to shocks and tampering.
Link to the platform The visualization of the data was designed in such a way so that every user could easily extract the information of the exact location in Delhi or India and know more about the real-time air-quality of that area at any given point of time. The colour-coding of the exact location helped in indicating the degree of severity of air-pollution in that respective area along with a set of prescribed actions that the user may follow. The designed visualization highlighted the changing trends of air quality via graphs and figures making the whole understanding part of the data as simple and easy as possible.
