IoT Madrid Meetup group presentation

[Cesar Garcia]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to introduce you our IoT Meetup group in Madrid. Even though we have been working on AQE also since November, we have not introduced ourselves or presented our activities on a regular base.

We organize a couple of meetups every month, and are advancing the topics that appear on this air quality egg list. Medialab-Prado is our meeting place and supports the group activities with in house materials and expertise.

On our first meetups, we invited several members to talk about their projects and did introductory Arduino workshops. You read more about them (in Spanish) in there posts written by Sara: http://sientetecity.wordpress.com/2012/03/27/segundo-­encuentro-­internet-de­‐las-­cosas-y­‐las‐personas­‐en­‐madrid/ and http://trecedejunio.com/?p=1047. 

In May, Medialab-Prado organized a conference about air quality and the commons, inviting several experts in open data and air quality/climate simulation.

In June, we organized a workshop to assemble AQE prototype version one. We plan to build a device library where everyone borrow one to measure air quality at home and propose more complex experiments. 

During last month, we have been working on creating custom enclosures using recycled bottles and exploring how to tag AQE properly. These kind of brainstorming sessions are really useful to gather feedback. Here is the information for example about our last sessions:

Prototyping Sensor Enclosure Design:

Several interesting points were made during this session.  There should be air flow enough around the sensor to take a more reliable measurement. In our setup, a bottle cut in two, would serve as enclousure. Big holes were drilled in the bottom part to allow condensed water to flow down and air flow. In the bottom part of the top, just under the cap, small holes were made with a small heated needle. This holes will not let water came inside, but would make air flow inside. This approach is consistent with latest Albert Chao designs.

Both ethernet and USB cables come throught the bottom holes, and conect to the AQE, that is suspended inside using fishing thread. USB connector being less stable, was decided to be put in the upside part, so there is no tension in it. Ethernet connector is on the bottom of the bottle.

During the next week protype was tested and it showed no signs of condensation inside. Weather was very dry during the week. Compared to other eggs in the same window, temperature inside was in some moments even 10ºC higher. You can check data for AQE Protoype number 3 in our cosm account: http://cosm.com/users/dcdcity

There were some suggestions about using paint to improve air flow, but were not explored further. There are photos of the finished prototype in the meetup group gallery of the event: http://www.meetup.com/iotmadrid/events/72353012/

Air Quality Egge metadata session

Instead of focusing on metadata, people were interested about how to extract data from Cosm to exploit data in MatLab, R and even Excel. We focused on using API to extract data to be analyzed further.

W3C SSN Ontology was explained and everyone agreeded that using standards based tags in Cosm would be great to be able to make sense of data afterwards. Given the technical nature of the topic, it will be explored further in August.

Checking AQE data, we discovered that sun distorts heavily NO2 sensor measurement. It is necessary to put AQE sensor units under cover or in the shadows, to make measurement conditions stable. Otherwise we will get false positives that render data unusable. We could, of course filter by temperature, to hunt for these events but it's best if we get data right from the first moment. Painting the eggs topic appeared again, both in meetup and in the list, but given we cannot ensure paint will be applied in an uniform way it was discarded, as it would alterate measurements further.

There were some very interesting questions about using plastic bottles, that could produce some components that would be picked up by a VOC sensor as false positive. Using organic components that would absorb water, like coconuts could solve this problem. Using bio-ethanol based plastic bottle could aliviate it also, but they are harder to get.

Link to the event description filled with interesting information: http://www.meetup.com/iotmadrid/events/73022172/

We'd like to invite everyone to visit our meetup page (http://www.meetup.com/iotmadrid/) and join our sessions in Madrid.

Best,

Sara and César

P.D We'd like to recomend also the presentation by Julio Galaron, exploring HTML5, websockets and IoT that could be used to program using Cosm new sockets server: http://keynotes.kybalion.es/iotMadWebSocket.pdf

 

--
Cesar García - @elsatch

Ando con encolamiento para responder correos y los proceso lunes, miércoles y viernes. Si es algo urgente/rápido contáctame por Twitter. Gracias!

[Usman Haque]

thanks for the intro Cesar, good to hear about all your work and findings.

fyi, here's a great javascript library for Cosm: http://petecorreia.com/cosmjs/ which will become an "official" library shortly. with it you can work with almost the entire Cosm API in webpages, including websockets, really easily.

usman

On Saturday, July 21, 2012 7:56:19 PM UTC+1, Cesar Garcia Saez wrote:

.... 

[Martin Dittus]

On 21 Jul 2012, at 19:56, Cesar Garcia wrote:
>
> Checking AQE data, we discovered that sun distorts heavily NO2 sensor measurement. It is necessary to put AQE sensor units under cover or in the shadows, to make measurement conditions stable. Otherwise we will get false positives that render data unusable. We could, of course filter by temperature, to hunt for these events but it's best if we get data right from the first moment. Painting the eggs topic appeared again, both in meetup and in the list, but given we cannot ensure paint will be applied in an uniform way it was discarded, as it would alterate measurements further.

These kinds of insights are really useful when managing data quality. Thanks for sharing, I added it to http://airqualityegg.wikispaces.com/Measured+Phenomena

m.