Project: Build an Arduino BLE-Enabled Indoor Air Quality Monitor via All About Circuits

I am very interested in projects which help me gain a better understanding of the world around me and monitoring my environment is certainly one of the more important tasks in that regard. I have been thinking about projects like this as builds for school-based maker groups so that they could monitor their own surroundings and perhaps find areas that need improvement, long before research projects through more official channels could even be mounted.

I would consider this an intermediate to advanced project with lots of components to be managed and coded for. I love the inclusion of Bluetooth LE (or any other wireless system) so that data can be read and monitored even at some distance. For me, all IoT devices need some way of sharing their data easily in real-time and Bluetooth is just one way to accomplish that. This would also allow for the creation of a dashboard to monitor data, in realtime, in some central, public, location, which would greatly help to make the data known to a wide variety and number of people.

This project is well documented and should prove to be an excellent source of new skills and knowledge for anyone who attempts it.

Build an Arduino BLE-Enabled Indoor Air Quality Monitor via All About Circuits

Like most folks, I sometimes wonder about the quality of the air I breathe. Naturally, I turned to the possibility of a project designed to measure the quality of the air in my own home.

Indoor air quality is not a simple concept to quantify. I assumed that too much CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) didn’t seem like a good idea. Furthermore, large concentrations of VOCs (volatile organic compounds) didn’t sound too pleasant either. So, I reasoned that these would be some important measures to have available.

After further investigation, I found only a few ICs available to build such a project around. I settled on the iAQ-Core module from AMS.
As I read more about measuring indoor air quality, I began to appreciate the complexity of the issue. The volatility of many compounds (the degree to which they vaporize into the air) depends, in part, on the temperature. Also, relative humidity can be a factor for some compounds. Thus, I decided to add temperature and relative humidity sensors to the project.

Of course, I wanted to use a microcomputer with a display to read sensor output. As an additional feature, I decided to include BLE connectivity to allow remote monitoring.

Read the entire article on All About Circuits

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Microsoft release Outlook.com email services to replace Hotmail

Today Microsoft released its new email service Outlook.com to replace its Hotmail brand. This new streamlined Metro interface design looks good and functions well so far. You can use your existing Microsoft account to log in and then choose an email alias (i.e. douglaswelch@outlook.com) for your new email address. Here are several articles that discuss Outlook.com... Goodbye, Hotmail; Hello, Outlook.com [REVIEW] Outlook Is a Completely New, Feature-Filled Webmail Service from Microsoft Go Get Your @Outlook Email Address Quick Before Someone Else Does I will post links to more articles and reviews as they appear.

Shared calendars are one part of an organized family

by Douglas E. Welch , techiq@welchwrite.com 206-338-5832 Reader/Listener Line As a parent with a school-age child, I often hear other parents bemoaning their disorganized existence. Along with the busy schedules of two working parents you might have art classes, karate classes, Little League, soccer and more. Add in more than one kid and organizing your life can quickly become a nightmare. This is exactly why one of my most important organizing devices is a shared calendar that reflects all the activities and events for everyone in the household...and I do mean everything. If someone -- is required to be somewhere -- at sometime, it goes into the calendar. If we are given a calendar that reflects all the events for a particular activity (say, Little League), all these events immediately go into the calendar, along with notations on whether we are providing the team snack, working in the snack bar, etc. Even events that occur anytime during the day, like family birthdays, and other rem...

Google Docs adds templates

I have started to move away from using Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc) in favor of online tools like Google Docs . Even as a computer consultant, I find that I use probably less than 10% of the features in any of these projects. One feature I really like in Google Docs is the easy, online file sharing that also allows you to edit simultaneously with someone else. Today, Google Docs added some templates including business cards, brochures and more. At the moment, it looks like they are rolling out this feature over time, so you might not yet see the templates on your account. When available, you will find the templates under the New... menu item. From Open Loops ... Today, Google quietly rolled out a new feature for their Google Docs Applications: Templates! It's so new that it isn't even listed on the new features page at this time. When one opens their Google Docs account and chooses to start a new document, a new "From Template..." command is pre...

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