[kingsloi]

I run a lil air quality sensor in the Miller neighbourhood of Gary, IN. I started off with a PurpleAir II, then higher tech monitor from AQMesh for a few months, and now I operate another higher tech monitor from a local company in Valparaiso, IN called Sensit Technologies, which they generously donated.

I also operate a AIS boat tracker from FleetMon. I did track aircraft flying to/from ORD/MDW/GYY, and also the local train operator SouthShore line have an open API (I wish the other tracks, Norfolk Southern, would have an API!)

I built a crappy lil frontend/api using Express and do plan to continue to work on it and track more stuff, hopefully more people with use it. Hopefully it convinces some more citizen scientists to run their own (bring your own cloud & hardware)

https://millerbeach.community

It's actually had a lot of visits recently due the the BP oil refinery leaking SO2 after a recent storm [1], and now the Canadian wildfires bringing that PM our way, our air quality is the worst it's been since I've started to track it.

I was hoping to figure out how to turn the years of data into an infographic, or use AI to digest the data and generate a bunch of useful data points/stats. If anyone knows of an easy way, rather than creating the queries by hand!

https://github.com/kingsloi/community-airmonitor

[1] https://abc7chicago.com/sulfur-smell-indiana-bp-refinery-whi...

[symlinkk]

Holy shit dude you live in Gary? Isn’t that one of the most violent cities in the country, with a ton of abandoned buildings?

[kingsloi]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder! Gary is home to some beautiful flora and fauna, we have miles and miles of beautiful Lake Michigan shoreline, the 61st National Park. I'm at 990~ miles of biking in/around Gary and I've took some really beautiful photos, which I'm hoping to compile into something like blog post "1000 miles in/around Gary" or something.

Everything else is just like everywhere else. Poverty.

[throwaway24124]

This is an awesome project, I would love to do something similar for my community. Great UX design too. FYI, the trends and weather modals aren't loading data (possibly because of the darksky.net API cutoff?)

[kingsloi]

Hey I appreciate that, just been tinkering with it as I added more to it... it's came a long way from when I ran a simple PurpleAirII!

Yeah I'm working on the Darksky replacement, but the trends issues is because of another hidden cost of air quality monitoring: lots of data! My mongo queries aren't the most efficient and for the past week or two I must have topped a Mongo/RAM issue and my DO box is running into memory issues. I'll hopefully get that fixed soon! Especially now, it's a cool lil feature as you can see around what day/time we first started to get hit with the CA wildfire smoke.

Feel free to pull it and add to it as you want! You could probably just use a PurpleAirII monitor near you and use that as for your AQI until you get something else, and disable all the other stuff (boats, advisories, etc), and keep traffic, planes, air quality. That's kinda how I've been doing it anyway.