Revisting AQI Monitor w/ Raspberry Pi & SDS011

James Proctor

Nov 25, 2024 — 1 min read

It lives inside the shell of an old mac mini. I'm aiming the sensor out an IO port on the back. Don't worry I've since fixed that poor GPIO pin.

When I originally put this together back in December 2020 I was living in the Bay Area. Wildfire smoke was bad that year and I wanted a sense of whether my indoor air quality was any better. (it was fine... so long as we kept the windows closed). With a handful of interruptions I've had it logging air quality once an hour since then.

I largely following this guide from Marcelo Rova and based my scripts on the accompanying code. The only real exception being that I opted to write my data out to a file and then rclone that to a shared folder on a cloud service.

More recently I integrated some line graphs showing the recent indoor AQI and pi system temperatures as a custom module in MagicMirror so that it shows up on this status board display in the office.

A vertical monitor displays a status board. It includes graphs for system temperatures and Office AQI, as well as weather, calendar, and public transit information.

Stacked sheets of glass with it's edges cut to specific lengths to represent data values.

Home Depot Culture

I recently came across the proposal I wrote for this project from 2007. In a bit of odd foreshadowing my concept was essentially to do a data visualization, although I don't seem to have known the term. Instead I describe my goal in an incredibly stilted manner. "

Particles, 5 ways

A while back I created this Observable notebook as a reference for rendering particle systems using a few different front-end libraries. You can debate whether 100 particles is 'lots' but this will likely keep your browser happier when all 5 examples are loaded at once. I agree with

An axi-drawn smiley face with some registration problems

Thanks for Visiting

About Me I'm James Proctor, I make art with software tools and work as a developer specializing in data visualization. For a while now I've been focused on the ways the systems we build reflect our values, and using software systems to explore that relationship. I’

An Adafruit Neotrellis with it's led buttons illuminated to indicate buttons.

Riffing on the Launch_Deck_Trellis_M4 Example

Aside from Noisy Grains of Sand, which is awesome, I've probably spent the most time messing around with variations on the Launch Deck example that takes advantage of the controller's ability to emulate a usb keyboard. This is the button mapping I've landed on

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Home Depot Culture

Particles, 5 ways

Thanks for Visiting

Riffing on the Launch_Deck_Trellis_M4 Example