AirU is an NSF-funded, multidisciplinary collaboration at the University of Utah's College of Engineering. The goal of the project is to vastly increase coverage of pollution monitoring in the Salt Lake Valley through the deployment of low-cost pollution monitoring stations, in an effort to raise awareness of personal airborne pollution exposure as well as provide a spatially and temporally dense open-source dataset of airborne pollution in the Salt Lake Valley.
The AirU sensor network consists of a large-scale network of WiFi-enabled embedded system network nodes. Each node is connected to a local WiFi network, which it uses to upload local, spatially static atmospheric measurements (including: PM1, PM2.5, PM10, ambient temperature and humidity, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxide) to a database hosted at the University of Utah. The data is made publically available, and there is an ongoing effort to efficiently calibrate the data in order to produce reliable analyses.
AirU V1 is currently deployed at roughly 50 homes in the Salt Lake Valley. AirU V2 is currently in production and will see it's first deployed testing at the end of the 2018 summer season. This iteration has a number of advantages over the first version, most notably the use of less of expensive compenents without any loss of functionality, as well as a more intuitive User Interface.