Air high quality is a severe concern in lots of areas. For instance, Cairo (a metropolis infamous for poor air high quality) has an estimated 12,600 untimely deaths per 12 months which can be attributable to air pollution within the air. However studying a statistic like that isn’t as efficient as a visualization of the hazard; people reply higher to what they’ll see than to what they’re informed. To harness that for the great of his metropolis, Ahmed Oyenuga created the Interactive Air High quality Map.
This undertaking accommodates two main components: the info assortment system and the show map. The map accommodates LED edge-lit clear acrylic cutouts of various areas within the space round Lagos, Nigeria. When a consumer touches a area, it illuminates in a colour that corresponds to the present air high quality. Gentle yellow signifies that the air high quality is nice, whereas purple signifies that the present air high quality is so unhealthy that it’s harmful. A number of ranges alongside a gradient between these two colours present an approximate measure of the real-time air high quality.
For this map to be efficient, it wants up-to-date air high quality knowledge. Whereas the AQI (Air High quality Index) for Lagos as an entire is accessible on-line, the knowledge isn’t granular sufficient to point out how air high quality varies all through the town (like the net maps we’ve got for a lot of the USA). That compelled Oyenuga to assemble his personal knowledge. To do this, he developed air high quality sensor stations utilizing DesignSpark’s Environmental Sensor Improvement Equipment. Every station detects the air high quality and uploads the info, together with its GPS location, to the cloud. Oyenuga’s assets are restricted and he hasn’t been capable of deploy many of those stations, however he did show the idea.
The interactive map pulls that knowledge from the cloud utilizing an Arduino MKR WiFi 1010 improvement board. When the consumer selects a area on the map, the Arduino units WS2812B individually addressable RGB LED strips round that area to the correct colour. A customized board that Oyenuga constructed on a Microchip ATSAMD21J17 microcontroller handles the capacitive contact sensing and tells the Arduino which area to light up.
This undertaking serves two functions. First, it offers a visualization that hammers residence the severity of the air high quality in Lagos and that might encourage change. Second, people might use the map to plan their journeys via the town. If a specific area has particularly poor air high quality on that day, then they’ll keep away from that space and take an alternate route.
