Category: IoT

In-Depth Review: Wynd Halo 1st Edition Sensors

Sotirios Papathanasiou6 Comments

The Wynd Halo 1st Edition uses a proprietary PM sensor with a blue-light laser instead of a red-light laser, which presumably makes it more accurate and precise. Interestingly, I remember during the Kickstarter campaign of the monitor, backers were asking the company if they will sell the sensor as a component part to third parties, and they said yes because it was about to revolutionize the industry.

Although I don’t have a reference monitor, the comparison I conducted is considered a field evaluation in a real-life situation. AQ Monitors are designed to operate inside apartments and buildings for this reason I personally value more a field evaluation in situ than a lab evaluation where every parameter is controlled.

This kind of evaluation won’t tell us how accurate is the sensor, but it will reveal the correlation against other monitors in order to determine if measure something respectable. For example, there are many field and lab evaluations for the commonly found Plantower PMS5003 sensor that demonstrate a correlation of 0.78 – 0.93 against various reference monitors.

Read More »

Study: Taking a closer look at the air quality in classrooms

Sotirios Papathanasiou4 Comments

After almost two months of asking local schools for permission to install air quality monitors in their classrooms, on the 4th of December, a local school decided to grant me access.

In my city, Almeria, Spain, there are about 110 schools. I didn’t apply to all of them because each time I managed to find a way to contact them, I had to arrange a meeting in order to explain to them what I wanted to do, and all this process takes time. I managed to contact nine schools.

For this study, schools didn’t have to pay anything, so money wasn’t the issue for their refusal. They were worried about what will happen if the results were disappointing and negative. I tried to explain to them that the aim of the study is to understand what is going on in the classroom, in real conditions, with real students. I don’t want to discredit the school either the local authorities that manage the budget for the school. For this reason, I will keep the name of the school private.

Monitors

The monitors that I have installed for the study are made by Airthings. There are two Wave Plus, which include a CO2 sensor by Senseair. The sensor is called Sunrise, and it is an ultra-low-power, high precision NDIR sensor. Accuracy (CO2) ±30 ppm ±3% of reading. Finally, it features a self-correction system that allows them to auto-calibrate every 180 hours. I also have included a Wave mini monitor in the teacher’s office room. 

Read More »

Air Quality Adaptive Information (AQAI)

Sotirios PapathanasiouLeave a comment

Apple iOS 14 has brought many new features to phones and tablets. For the first time, I enrolled in the beta versions of the operating system for the iPhone just because I wanted to explore the user experience (UX) of the widgets.

Long story short, I really loved them, especially the weather widget because of how intuitive it is about the information that it displays. Generally, we are accustomed to the static widgets that they only update the information every 10 minutes and that’s all, but what Apple did with the weather widget was phenomenal. Depending on the time of the day it is able to display the most important information for users to read and make appropriate decisions.

During the day, you can see the current temperature and weather forecast for the following 6 hours, plus the highest and lowest temperature of the day. However, during the night, it makes a short suggestion about the following day, for example, Warmer tomorrow with a high of 29ºC. It is fantastic because you can plan the day ahead. I call this feature Adaptive Information, and this is what I will value as a user from an air quality monitor or and AQ app.

iOS 14: Left Day | Right Night
Read More »

Review: BRISE C360 Air Purifier

Sotirios Papathanasiou4 Comments

There are a few things you can do to reduce air pollution indoors like keeping things tight and clean, not smoking, using exhaust fans when you cook, and ventilating the rooms, but at the end of the day if the air pollution comes from outside sources then you need to take drastic measures and there is only one solution, investing in an air purifier.

There are many air purifiers on the market for all types of budgets but you shouldn’t expect a cheap air purifier to offer the same features and purification results as a high-end purifier. By the way, air cleaners and air purifiers are the same things.

BRISE C360 is a high-end purifier capable of purifying up to 95 m2 or 1022 ft2 room and rated CADR at 390 m3/hr or 230CFM. It is recommended for medium size rooms and it packs a ton of features.

Read More »

Review: Airthinx IAQ for Businesses

Sotirios Papathanasiou3 Comments

In a previous post, I presented Airthinx IAQ for Homeowners and how an advanced AQ monitor can be used for indoor environmental monitoring. In this post, we will explore how we can use the same monitor but in business environments (offices, industrial buildings, food supply chains, etc).

We will focus on the tools present in the dashboard as it is one of the best dashboards you will find in the market, and we will learn how to get the most out of it.

Let’s begin with the Dashboard – Home. Here we can create various types of widgets and arrange them according to our preference. First, you can see that I have created a column with all the current measurements with small graphs of the environmental parameters. Right next to it, I always watch for the general AQ, PM2.5, and Humidity. Below I have more widgets with other graphs and values that I want to have a glance.

Dashboard – Home

Next, we can see the Map tab. Here we can locate all the available monitors in a high precision as the monitors come with a GPS module, however, we will see later that we can manually set the location of the device.

Read More »

Outdoor Air Quality Monitors 2020Q4

Sotirios Papathanasiou10 Comments

Since my last update of the outdoor (ambient) air quality monitors list back in 2018, new products have been released into the market for various purposes and different budgets. Air quality monitors for professional use in cities and industrial sites and homeowners who want to supervise the ambient air quality outside their houses/apartments.

Read More »

Air Quality Monitors – Comparison List 2020 Q4

Sotirios Papathanasiou23 Comments

It has been a while since the last time I updated the list with all the air quality monitors in the market. Just to be clear, there are a lot more Chinese knockouts that I haven’t included because they don’t have any support from the companies either they offer something unique.

This time the list includes some Pro-level indoor AQMs like the elichens
Indoor Air Quality PRO Station and the NEMo XT – Indoor.

  • Prices may vary during time.
  • Some Companies don’t specify on their data sheet if their devices are capable to measure PM2.5 or PM10 and they just mention the word dust.
  • Some other companies say: Our product goes beyond CO₂ by analyzing substances that directly affect your well-being by measuring VOCs. They aren’t clear if their devices have CO₂ sensor.
  • Some of the devices are AQI Monitors and Air Purifiers Combo. On this list you can only read the features as an AQI monitor.

CO2 Monitors for Indoor AQ Monitoring and Management during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Sotirios PapathanasiouLeave a comment

The pandemic has made us aware of the indoor air quality. We have learned that it is important to monitor the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration inside a room for two reasons: To keep productivity up and to reduce the chances of infection especially, when a room is occupied by many people like in classrooms, offices, etc.

A CO2 monitor can help us estimate the risk of infection of the coronavirus as a high concentration number (above 900 ppm) can indicate that too many people are inside a room, and the air hasn’t been renewed as frequently as the regulations indicate, in some countries.

There are a lot of indoor CO2 monitors in the market, I have reviewed many of them, but I thought it is useful to gather them all together in one place and make your life easier.

Read More »

Building an IoT Air Quality Monitor that will survive the competition

Sotirios Papathanasiou7 Comments

Building a hardware startup is a hard business, we are well aware of that. Right now, there are a lot of indoor/outdoor Air Quality Monitors in the market that support low-cost sensors, unfortunately, even when the cost of the materials (aka BOM) is low, companies struggle to survive because of an initial bad business model.

If you want to enter into the game of the air quality or in general of the IoT, you have to ask yourself: How do I turn what I do into a compelling service?

When you sell a product you earn some money, typically three times more of what you have spent. However, your income relies only on that model and the problem with technology is that it evolves constantly, so tomorrow a new company will sell a product a bit better than yours because there will be a new sensor in the market and all future clients will shift their attention towards that device. Then you have to wait for a year or more in order to realize that you have to shut down your product and taking down with you a few hundred to thousand clients that have bought your AQM — More e-waste and frustration for the end-users.

For this reason, you have to invest in software development as well, and here comes my expertise. I have seen a lot of Air Quality Monitors, and I have collaborated with a fair number of companies in the field, but I always see the same mistake.

Some companies believe that they have to give customers free data support and services for life and if they turn their product into a paid service and they ask money based on a subscription model then they will lose costumers, but this is not necessarily correct. You are not going to ask someone to subscribe to your service to get just numeric values of a pollutant, you have to offer them something more than that. Something the competitors can’t offer because this feature is unique in your ecosystem. Maybe it could be restricted with a patent too.

Consumers really value good products especially when they can’t find something similar.

You are going to ask me, “What can I offer them?” You have two options, stay tuned for future articles or contact me in order to discuss how we can collaborate.

 

uHoo – Virus Index (Update)

Sotirios Papathanasiou3 Comments

Some of you have contacted me because you wanted to know my opinion on uHoo’s latest update. Since June 2020, uHoo has implemented a Virus Index which is a patent-pending technology that uses the power of air quality data to help you know how suitable your close environment is for a virus to survive and spread.

uHoo is an air quality monitor that features nine environmental and pollution sensors. If you want to learn more, read my review here.

uhoo app 2020 virus index

Read More »