Chris, Very nice device. And smart testing setups. The Explorables visualizations are fantastic. That will change the way people understand data sets. Do you have a target price point for Speck? I saw Illah's Engadget video with $50-$100 for AirBot and WaterBot. It looks like these are not open source. Does the Create Lab hope to partner with someone to manufacture them?
Excellent stuff. Chris

Hi Chris! Thanks for the kind words. We are indeed working with a manufacturing partner for CATTFish (formerly WaterBot), but I don't know exact costs yet. For Speck (formerly AirBot), we're not quite as far along, still considering various options. The $50-$100 numbers in the Engadget article seem low for commercial product prices, at least for a first run--I imagine those numbers were for BOM and/or production in high quantities (tens of thousands).

That display is impressive.

I'll be quite crass and ask: would you like to donate any of these to some folks down in Reserve and Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana? It could mean a lot for folks who live in the shadow of Grain and Petroleum coke Export facilities. I'm currently making a DustDuino or two, in my spare time (which is mythical) but I can think of 7 communities in Louisiana who would want to deploy these to gather evidence that these facilities are making it hard to breathe around here.

I'll forward this to my roomate, a CMU alum in New Orleans.

cheers!

scott scott@healthygulf.org

The Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project (SWP-EHP) is using the Speck to investigate effects of natural gas drilling in PA, they lend Specks out to individual homes for 2-4 weeks to gather data. They also provide free analysis support. The SWP project seems like a great model for others to emulate and as Scott E. indicates, folks in Louisiana could certainly benefit (thanks to Dvera Saxton for info on SWP-EHP).

The specksensor.org site mentions the device is still 'under development' but I've not been able to find info regarding availability, cost, etc. Any idea of this?

This is inspiring work Chris, thanks for posting!

gerald

Exciting to see... What's the most minimal sensor we could create though? Could we just connect the pm sensor to an openlux (http://publiclab.org/tag/openlux/) and have it generate a colored light and connect to a laptop for data download?

How much does the Syhitech DSM501A cost and are there plans or software for the Speck available? I know that CMU Create lab is open source which is really awesome.

Data sheet for the sensor: tmp_DSM501A_Dust_Sensor630081629.pdf

I also found a couple places to buy it, but they don't show prices better than the listed Shenyei $15.80 or so:

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/NEW-For-DSM501A-dust-sensor-South-Korea-SYHITECH-dust-dust-sensor-/251174567486?clk_rvr_id=622467543268 ($14)

http://apollosense.en.alibaba.com/product/834915677-218449778/Dust_sensor_DSM501A_for_IAQ_monitor.html (no price, could be good if bought in quantity)

So I'll try to answer some ?'s: The Shinyei was around $15- we tried that first. The Syhitech is something like $3 in reasonable quantities. So it's vastly cheaper and nearly identical when you look at them side by side. I don't know where the last place we bought them, but it was a many-weeks delivery time, probably offshore. We don't have DIY plans for how to make a speck- it's a real mold right now, but we want to work out a DIY process that deals with voltage regulation and light-tightness (these are what kill most attempts at this sensor usage). We do have a library of Specks- we just built a total of 300 to lend out- so if you are interested in borrowing some to try it out, of course that's what we are about. 150 are already out and about. If you are interested you can start by reaching out to me and I'll introduce you to the outreach folks in CREATE. Scott at healthy Gulf, we should easily be able to get you a couple to try out and see if it detects what you need it to detect.

Hi Scott, Gerald and all.

Thanks for all the comments! The Speck is currently not commercially available, but could be very soon. Please sign up for our mailing list to stay tuned (just select the Speck check-box): http://cmu.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=9ab233975f9af4c0b78f67a12&id=1c07baa302

Also, our Gateway software for the Speck is free and open-source, and available at: http://specksensor.org/software/

If you have any other questions about the Speck or want to inquire about borrowing a Speck for an interesting project/activity, please email us at speck@cmucreatelab.org

Cheers, Bea

Community Outreach Coordinator CREATE Lab

Nice work. What sort of fan are you using to draw air across the sensor?

Also, if anyone visiting this page would like to do something like this themselves I made an Instructable with step by step instructions: http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-measure-particulate-air-pollution-and-share/

My setup isn't quite as sophisticated, but it posts the data to Xively.com and isn't too complicated.

alxmjo: Sorry about the delay in replying. Here is the digikey part number for the fan we use: 563-1111-ND. We checked out your DIY set up - glad to see it! You may want to shield the IR sensor from direct light though, so as not to cause interference.

Last week, @mathew and I worked on standard Open Pipe Kit drivers for a range of different optical dust sensors, to get them all feeding into http://data.sparkfun.com. We put one together for the Speck too, take a look: https://github.com/jywarren/opk-speck-cli

Great idea and great monitoring! Please can you post some information about the software you use for the visualization of the data for the grid and home test?

@ledi001

All the visualization software is custom stuff we developed at the CREATE Lab. The grapher in the demos is our BodyTrack grapher which we've now mostly replaced with a new version that supports WebGL (with a fallback to Canvas for browsers which don't support WebGL). The grid is a one-off, written just for that particular visualization.

Probably the best place to start learning about the grapher is with our wrapper library: https://github.com/BodyTrack/plot-manager

Hi there! still on this project? There's a Public Lab event coming up not too far from you in Morgantown WV. You should think about coming!

www.publiclab.org/barnraising