On this page you will find the following different results and outputs from the Life VAQUUMS project for low-cost air quality sensors:
- the firmware used to program the ESP8266 to prepare and send low-cost PM sensor data to our internal Influx database over local WiFi
- an interactive viewer to analyse and compare Luftdaten/Sensor.Community PM-measurements to official ones in Belgium
- the complete dataset of the VAQUUMS field campaign with all the low-cost sensor and official Flanders Environment Agency (VMM) measurements for PM, NOx and O3 spanning over 1 year of data
Nearly all of the low-cost sensors were coupled to an Arduino which was interfaced to an ESP8266 module. The ESP8266 took care of storing the data over WiFi to a local network running an Influx database.
The firmware for the ESP8266 was written in VSCode using the PlatformIO extension. You can find the latest version of the firmware source code here.
For controlling the Alphasense OPC-N2 sensor we used the C library developed by David H Hagan.
A demonstration video showing the different features of the interactive viewer can be found here.
This viewer was developed by Panodata in Grafana and uses their Luftdatenpumpe as workhorse to retrieve Luftdaten/Sensor.Community data over the API and combine it with official air quality measurements from the Belgian endpoint hosted by IRCEL.
You can try the viewer it out yourself by visiting this link and supplying the following credentials to log in:
username: vaquums
password: vaquum$!The field campaign of the low-cost sensors was organised at the official Flanders Environment Agency (VMM) monitoring station R801 in Borgerhout, Antwerp, Belgium (WGS84 coordinates: 51.2097 lat, 4.4318 lon). All of the low-cost sensors were placed in different shelters on the rooftop the monitoring station.
The following 19 sensors were tested in fivefold during a period of over one whole year from the 23rd of February 2019 until the 31st of March 2020.
| Sensormodel | Pollutant |
|---|---|
| Nova Fitness SDS011 | PM |
| Shinyei PPD42NJ | PM |
| Shinyei PPD60PV-T2 | PM |
| Honeywell HPMA115S0 | PM |
| Plantower PMS7003 | PM |
| Winsen ZH03B | PM |
| Alphasense OX-B431 | O3+NOx |
| Alphasense NO2-B43F | NO2 |
| Citytech NO2 3E50 | NO2 |
| Citytech O3 3E1F | O3 |
| Membrapor NO2-C1 | NO2 |
| Membrapor NO2-C20 | NO2 |
| Membrapor O3-C5 | O3 |
| Dylos DC1700 | PM |
| Aeroqual O3 0-0.15 | O3 |
| Envea CairClip NO2 | NO2, RH, T |
| Envea CairClip O3 | O3, RH, T |
| Alphasense OPC-N2 | PM |
| BME280 DHT sensor | RH,T |
And the official measurements of the Flanders Environment Agency (VMM) used the following equipment:
| Instrument | Pollutant |
|---|---|
| Thermo Scientific 42i | NOx |
| API T400 | O3 |
| Palas Fidas 200 | PM |
| Palas Fidas 200 | RH, T |
You can access the entire dataset along with additional information here.
If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to send us an e-mail!