If it's the former, it might be useful to make that more clear on your site as I could not confirm it.
All low cost sensors are using the laser scattering technique and thus do approximate the mass and not a direct measurement.
However tests show that PM2.5 is the most accurate and often PM10 in these sensors is not very good.
With proper calibration, the PMS5003 sensor AirGradient uses is a real and fairly good measurement of PM1 (<1 micron), which is often fairly correlated with (and makes up much of) PM2.5. However, the sensor cannot really see particles larger than 1 micron, which sometimes matters for PM2.5 (when the PM1:PM2.5 ratio changes, like wildfires), and very much matters for PM10. That's why QuantAQ uses a PMS5003 combined with a different sensing technology (an optical particle counter) to actually measure PM2.5 and PM10, not just extrapolate from a PM1 measurement.
We have a blog post here explaining more: https://blog.quant-aq.com/can-your-plantower-pms5003-based-a...
I love the work that AirGradient is doing making AQ sensing technology open and accessible, especially to hardware hackers. The BOM cost of the OPC sensor we use alongside the PMS5003 is more than the cost of the entire AirGradient kit, so it is valuable to have options in the market depending on application.
What does affect air quality in my home massively, are the people parking their vehicles surrounding my home morning and afternoon as they drop off and pick up their children from the nearby school. I see a 10x ambient measure at these times. I was starting to think about how I could use BLE monitoring to track this somehow (the other thing my home is surrounded with at these times is devices broadcasting Bluetooth "beacons"(?)); could be an interesting experiment.
The next step for me is really knowing what and how something can be done about the pollution (generally speaking); Monitoring is great, but what's the next step?
Short term: install air filters
Long term: banning ICE cars
Also where there is good air, there ain't so many people.
A commercial model is around $200.
There are a lot of options so decide if you want to build it or buy it and plug it in!
Then you can list your data on a site like https://explore.openaq.org/
Then, I found a board from Adafruit. The chip is so tiny in the Adafruit photo!
Short answer, $1500 + $300 annually (includes cellular, realtime data calibration in our cloud, and full API access).
Relevant to the topic above, we are building for a slightly different market than AirGradient, and want to make sure we're an appropriate solution for potential customers -- you might genuinely be better served by a different product! As such, we're currently not optimized for low touch single sales to individuals, but it's something we'd like to improve in the future.
If you do contact sales, and we end up being a good fit for what you're looking for, we'd love to help!
I grew up in Southern California back when it was hard to see the mountains ten miles away on bad days.
I lived in Bangkok for two years. At the worst of the year I still wandered around maskless, thinking "feels like my childhood!" So for me it really didn't seem that bad, but I'm glad people are taking it more seriously now.
I got the presoldered version, kind of expecting it to be 100% assembled, but it was even better that I had to to "plug" the sensors and microcontroller in! It made me feel like I had achieved something myself, and gave an appreciation of how it works :)
The quality of the product looks excellent - inside and out. Although maybe some snap-in transparent plastic in front of the display would protect it from accidental damage? Not that there is any reason to ever touch it, so I guess its not really that important. It certainly doesnt detract from the overall build quality.
A minor niggle on adding the sensor to the online app - i didn't get any feedback that it had added, and when i tried a second time it told me that it was already added. Also, I cant see a way to add/edit places other than creating the one during setup. Probably a few other minor UX niggles I can send an email if desired? But overall it looks great!
I am very interested to see how the air quality changes during the next kiln firings. Thanks!
I got everything to work with ESPHome, except for the BSEC version of the BME680 driver (I added a BME60 because I had one lying around. It worked fine with BSEC and ESPHOME on the ESP8266). I was thinking of sharing my experience, but I never got to it
0: https://www.digikey.com/short/rhbvm452 1: https://www.instructables.com/Radon-Mitigation-Monitor/
Thank you for sharing this.
I'm genuinely wondering how our nose is not a good enough sensor. Are there common cases that affect large areas like the one you live in, where the pollution is not smellable?
Thank you
But with just a nose it's hard to say if it's 100 μg/m3 of or 200 μg/m3 of PM2.5.
I am in EU and concerned that it might not be feasible for me to order your products due to high import fees, tax, customs, VAT, etc. that I would probably need to handle myself. Do you plan on establishing a dealer in EU or a shipping site in EU such that items can be shipped from within EU without customers having to deal with the customs, tax, etc?
After you are locked into their ecosystem, they prevent you from selling for less elsewhere, even on your own site, they coerce you into paying them ad fees to boost your listing in their search results, and if you don't pay them enough they will put your competitors above you and redirect searches that are specifically for your product to other similar items.
Then, if despite all of that you do well, they will find some company in China to make an "Amazon Basics" version of whatever it is that you're selling and then undercut you on price and boost their listings above yours.
You might even say that this is a win for consumers since they get fast cheap access to products, but the product quality is always a race to the bottom and because this happens so often it results in the death of product innovation from good companies because they have to spend so much brainpower and energy keeping the Amazon machine happy while it consumes them.
Ebay is a little better, but that is also rapidly enshittifying as well.
That makes it better than buying from indie sites just about every time.
Whatever Amazon has to offer is not worth what it costs to me, so I vote in other ways by shopping elsewhere, and should I have something to sell I will use other means to sell it.
Register a second company that is exclusively for distribution on amazon, with that company selling at the higher price.
Best done using corps
It can be a bit of hassle sometime, like having to pay for shipping or the delay in receiving it compared to amazon prime, or the option for return.
But apart from covering the shipping (which sometimes is okay for a product with higher value), I prefer to use the original website instead of Amazon. Few reasons being:
1. Genuine product 2. I don't want to help Amazon grow its huge empire 3. I want to support independent companies
So, hearing your comment, I'm glad I'm doing the right thing
EU dealer would have to pay the same import fees and VAT. It would be less of a hassle, but probably not cheaper.
In my country (and I guess many other EU countries - although it varies from country do country), it is a huge hassle and expensive too. And if you make any mistakes in the red tape you get hit with all sorts of ridiculous fees. Also, the package is usually delayed in customs for weeks or months. Whereas packages shipped from within EU typically arrives within next business day of them arriving in the destination country.
So avoiding the hassle is well worth it in order to get to the EU market.
Also, it may actually be cheaper. In my country, the local post office adds a "handling fee" of 30 EUR just for the service of informing you that you need to pay customs, VAT, etc. on the item. At least this is 30 EUR that can be saved on each item.
I looked into your product, but needed a monitoring solution, not a hobby project. I ended up paying a bit over $1000 for a (more capable) ambient weather solution, which meets the requirements in your blog post (with the possible exception of repairability).
Anyway, I’d have paid about 2x your pre-soldered kit price for a thing that came pre-assembled, with software preloaded, and an idiot proof way to publish the results to local devices and/or cloud services.
I am comfortable with soldering irons, writing embedded software, etc. However, I have plenty of money, but no time. I’m sure you could make large margins off of people like me, and plow it back into additional products.
Best of luck! You’re doing cool stuff!
I think the underlying picture here really is that I and my co-founder are both heavily affected by air pollution in Northern Thailand and are seeing how it affects the health of thousands of people.
We believe strongly that air quality monitoring should be affordable so that people from poorer regions and countries can afford air quality monitoring and thus protect their health by knowing when the air quality turns bad. This is one of the reasons why we open-sourced our air quality designs and are working with many NGOs and Universities to bring accurate low-cost air quality monitoring to underserved communities around the world.
Since we are a self-funded company we do not have pressure to maximize profit but can work under the mantra "Impact first (and profit will follow if we do a good job)."
By the way, if you work in air quality research, we are currently running a global co-location test program and are interested in additional partners [1].
[1] https://www.airgradient.com/research/