The issue of air quality has become a global topic. Outdoors, people can assess the severity of pollution by observing the orange-yellow sky and reduced visibility. This is when we know to open air quality detection software to see if we need to wear masks, turn on air purifiers, or let our children play outside. As humans, we are naturally good at responding to obvious visible problems.
However, if the sky outside is blue and the air is fresh, we cannot tell how severe the air pollution is, even though the air quality may exceed international standards by three times. If we only address visible pollution, we are not properly tackling the issue of air pollution. Indoors, assessing air quality is a challenging task; you cannot visually detect changes in air pollution.
To solve this problem, we want to design a product to help monitor the indoor air quality in our Shanghai studio.
At Frog, our work fundamentally changes the way businesses or industries operate and the way users experience products and services. One of the methods is turning creative ideas into reality, and prototyping is a very important step in this process.
When designing the lantern, our solution focuses on being affordable, networked, and capable of collecting data to a central database for analysis and monitoring. We also hope it is simple and aesthetically pleasing; we certainly do not want to bring visual pollution to the studio.
“When you want to design an interconnected product, one thing worth considering is its role offline; Wi-Fi will not always be connected, and sometimes we need to disconnect from the network,” said senior technology researcher Paul Adams. “If you don’t consider this, your product faces the possibility of becoming isolated, much like what happened to Nest V1 when Google disconnected the servers controlling it.”
The air quality monitoring lantern will maintain online mode, but if there is no network connection, it will automatically switch to offline mode and cease to publish real-time data or receive any user settings.
The lantern receives setting instructions from a central server, and you can freely set pollution threshold values. When the lantern turns red, it reminds you to improve air quality by closing windows and turning on the air purifier. When the lantern turns green, enjoy your coffee with peace of mind.
The core component of the lantern is the recently released PMS3003A sensor. This sensor can detect pollution particles from 0.3 to 10 microns. Although this sensor is very inexpensive, it provides data that is absolutely 100% accurate and offers a very intuitive visual representation for consumer-grade air quality monitoring products.
[PMS3003A Sensor]
Another important component of the lantern is NodeMCU. If you have used Arduino, this microcontroller is quite similar but has some advanced features, such as built-in memory and Wi-Fi, making it very suitable for prototyping networked devices.
[PMS3003A Sensor]
Regarding the lighting part of the lantern, we used the WS2818 LED ring. This product can give us any color, but it was a bit too bright, so we had to adjust the brightness to 30% for the final prototype.
If you want to make an air quality monitoring lantern, we have prepared a materials list for you on Github (https://github.com/frog/Airquality-Lantern), and everything can be purchased on Taobao.
Breathe freely and deeply! ^_^
Long press to easily follow us