We've recently been awarded funding from the University of Exeter's Civic University Agreements fund to do a bit more development on our SmogOff air pollution sensors, and send them out to three community groups around the country to use for answering their own local questions. We're working with Dr. Jo Garrett on this (who we've worked with before on the Sonic Kayaks) - Jo brings her own interests in understanding how people use the sensors and what benefits for their communities come from the project.
To begin with our priority is to make the sensors easier for people to use - in previous community tests it was quite clear that the design isn't very practical, and people were pulling out wires without noticing, or putting sensors in back to front. At the moment, the whole thing needs dismantling every time the SD card is removed to get the data off, or whenever the battery needs recharging. Our plan is to reduce the size of the electronics, and use a customised off-the-shelf box to house everything. This should make it easier to use and also far easier for people to build their own. We have, of course, decided to rewrite all the software too, so this is already turning out to be a bigger project than planned - as is often the way.
Once that's all done, we'll be calibrating them to Cornwall Council's reference station, so the data we collect with our sensors can be directly compared with the data the council use. This is a crucial step that's often missing from open source air pollution projects, and it's the step that means the data can actually be used by communities to lobby their local policy makers.
When all three sensors and built and calibrated, they'll be going off to a clean air group in Manchester, a cycling advocacy group in Worcester, and a parish council in Cornwall. These three groups are all people who've contacted us over the last year or two asking to use SmogOff - we've been holding them in mind while we tried to find funding to improve the sensors, so we didn't send them sensors that would have been prone to problems. It's taken a while, but here we are finally!
Throughout the project, Jo will be interviewing everyone involved to see how they use the sensors, how the data is understood, and how we can best present the data so that it's as straightforward as possible for people to use for their policy nudging. At the moment, Jo is heroically going through the university's ethics procedure to make sure everything about the interview process is as squeaky clean as possible.
More soon!