We are building an end-to-end solution for monitoring air quality in Magurele, Romania, in order to make this information publicly available to anyone with a web browser. A secondary goal is to use this as a learning opportunity for students, involving them in the development and long-term operation of the project.

The solution consists of AeRate boxes, communication infrastructure, database, and web application.

AeRate boxes use the LoRaWAN protocol to transmit the measurements leveraging on the low power, long range and zero running costs of this technology. The infrastructure uses a single LoRa Gateway installed on top of the tallest building in Magurele to provide as wide a coverage as possible. We are using a locally run instance of ChirpStack, an open-source LoRaWAN stack. This is both a measure for ensuring quality of service, but mostly an opportunity to challenge ourselves with operating our isolated infrastructure. Eventually we might migrate to a more decentralized approach like The Things Network. During development we are using InfluxDB for persistency and Grafana for data visualisation, but these may not be ideal for the project moving forward. We may reevaluate these as we go further.

This is an umbrella project, with several projects covering the details for each component:

Current status of implementation