Question: Question:

kp55 is asking a question about dustduino: Follow this topic

by kp55 | January 12, 2015 08:57 | #11516

What I want to do or know


What is the approximate cost of a full unit?

How long(ish) do they take to assemble?

Background story

I am trying to put together a small air quality monitoring project as part of a science outreach program, I am looking to buy a dozen PM2.5 sensors and place them round my local area, in gardens, parks ect and present the findings in a local science fair.

I am a scientist, with experience of using aerosol measurements, air quality modelling ect but little experience of taking measurements!



Hi KP55,
I think that the first thing you will need to know is how much data you need to acquire between data retrievals. That will determine how much memory you will need. If you need to acquire a point every 10 ms and can't get back to your instrument more than once a month, that will require a lot more memory than if you can acquire every hour and retrieve the data daily. If your data storage requirement is sufficiently low, then perhaps you can store the data in your Arduino's RAM. I wrote a sketch a little while back in Energia (very similar to Arduino) that begins logging data when commanded to and continues to log until it either acquires a predetermined maximum, or is given the command to export the data. In this research note (http://publiclab.org/notes/JSummers/09-23-2014/datalogger-part-2b-simpler-hardware-some-observations-about-ion-selective-electrodes-and-ram) I describe how more than 3000 pairs of integers can be stored in 32 kB RAM that comes with the TI Tiva LaunchPad. I just put the Energia source code online. It can be found here: https://github.com/SmokyMountainScientific/EnvDataLogger1. Hope that helps. Jack

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I agree that a non-wifi DustDuino variant would be so great -- much cheaper and simpler, for many uses where the WiFi isn't required. Both are great of course!

There's been some discussion of the idea here:


and here:


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