As a continuation of our capstone project, I helped design, fabricate, and install parts to retrofit our van into a mobile air quality monitoring lab.
I also worked with QuantAQ to develop a prototype for a device to connect any reference instrument to their online platform. I used a test-driven approach to develop the firmware framework in C++.
This van, loaded with reference instruments, will provide ground-truth data for low-cost air quality sensors in the field.
An instrument rack, air conditioner, pump, power supply, and more unistrut for mounting were the first additions to our mobile lab.
An existing 80-20 frame was transformed into a rack for securing instruments inside the van. The instruments needed to be removeable, isolated from vibration, and properly spaced.
A fun puzzle was figuring out how to thread the bolts through the wire rope isolators.
Emergency hole punching saved these brackets when I realized they weren't symmetric on both sides of the instrument!
Air is sampled at the front of the van, routed through a roof inlet, filtered, and connected to each instrument. The exhaust air comes out towards the back of the van.
This framework runs on a Particle device and handles the flow of data from the instrument to the cloud or SD card endpoints.
The framework was tested on an instrument with a Modbus protocol. Every second, a new data point hit our Particle Cloud endpoint.