Amy Wilson-Chapman

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Oct 9, 2013, 3:40:49 AM10/9/13
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Hello!

I have some very basic questions, apologies if I'm covering old ground - I'm hoping to confirm a couple things I have read as well.

I really love this project and am writing for a grant proposal to get journalists/citizens in Mongolia using the egg. We have some of the worst air pollution in the world in Ulaanbaatar.

- The eggs must be connected to ethernet, correct? (This will limit where I can use them). Is there a way to upload the data after it has been received?
- Ulaanbaatar is very dusty, will this impact the way the egg works? Is there a way around this (remember, I am a journalist and have little idea about this).
- Can anyone explain to me the SMS/Twitter alerts? One of my goals it to connect people who do not have access to internet, so SMS is fabulous.
- Is there a long lead time to receive an egg if I was to order one tomorrow? (http://shop.wickeddevice.com/?product=air-quality-egg)

Thanks so much! I'm quite excited to order an egg and get started.

Any other advice is more than welcome, again I apologies for any double-up.

Cheers,
Amy


Alex Huth

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Oct 28, 2013, 1:46:21 PM10/28/13
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Hi Amy. I haven't been able to figure out a convenient way to grab data from the egg without using the ethernet cable and connecting to the internet. I think I have read in a previous discussion that the egg is not capable of storing a batch of many readings in memory to upload as a batch later on.

I ordered my egg a couple months ago and it was delivered promptly, within a week or two. This was within the US so you may expect a longer delivery time, but there does not appear to be a big delay to get the unit shipped out.

You can measure raw values like the voltage across the sensor, by cracking open the egg and using some basic electronics tools, but that of course has limited utility. As for how the dust might affect the unit, this is the kind of question that many of us are working on right now - how does the egg perform when it's very hot, very cold, very wet, very dry, and so on.

Michael Flyger

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Jan 11, 2014, 8:15:50 PM1/11/14
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Alex -- One of the things I'm hoping to do is attach a shield with a 4GB SD card. I haven't gone there yet with the AQE nanodes but several of my Arduino (and homemade Arduinos) work fine with such shields.

To throw some stuff to Amy's quetions:

Bottom line is that the Air Quality Egg (AQE) is a hacker/maker tool (and toy). It does work out of the box but from there to <insert broader idea> there's a lot of work to do. Wicked Devices and other people in the community are working on stuff and they'd probably love to have more people using/working on it.

-- Making a stock AQE do things requires you to get familiar Xively's tools
I currently use the API to pull data from Xively using Python and Javascript. They have several methods. The process is probably a little weird and cludgy for anyone not used to programming.

-- The Nanode is designed expressly to be network connected (Nanode stands for "Network Application Node")

-- If you have access to someone with programming skills you can reprogram your AQE to do what you want. For example, I'm using a Raspberry Pi as a LAMP server (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Python -- usually P stands for Perl). What this means is you can have a $35 web server. I am experimenting aggregating data from my AQE to my LAMP server.

-- The readings from the sensors are *very raw* but seem to be modestly accurate. With more help from the environmental science community this should improve -- the sensors themselves are good products (consumer grade).

-- Working with clusters of AQEs requires ... lots of work. The code as it currently stands is designed best for a single Base / Remote pair (two eggs). Readings are displayed on Xively or AQE website as singular members. What this means is you'll have to do stuff to compare readings to "official" readings, pull data from all your individual eggs and participating community eggs to do statistics, etc.

If you're interested in becoming part of community air quality projects with "rough edges" this is a great project. Lots of work to be done but it's all open source so the work we all do can be shared for a better future AQE.

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