This is my write-up of my Hackergrant II project that was completed last year as part of the Gold Coast TechSpace Hackergrant program (supported by Advance Queensland). The project goal was to build a connected Co2 sensor for use in classrooms & meeting rooms.
Excessive Co2 in overcrowded and badly ventilated rooms is a source of tiredness which had affected me personally and I wanted to have a way to monitor this over time (and potentially alert on dangerous levels).
My original proposal is below for your information:
Part of the challenge for this project was that I also wanted to be transparent on my progress and manage the project properly in an effort to demonstrate to other TechSpace members how structure and goals can help deliver a personal project and not just consign it to the list of unfinished experiments.
The project was tracked in the Trello project management tool – this is a simple Kanban style “wall” and while not as feature rich as some other tools I find it extremely accessible and friendly so now use this for all of my projects. The board is now public and you can see where I am up to here:
https://trello.com/b/nqmOMCou/air-quality-monitoring-hackergrant
(note there are still some tasks to do so I will keep this open for future development).
I also kept people notified of what I was up to in the #project-air-quality channel of the GCTechSpace slack. Linking my bitbucket repositories and the Trello board via slack bots made this a great one-stop shop for project status.
My final presentation is included below which describes the progress and some of the challenges faced. The project is still active and is currently in the process of being converted to LoRa wireless with a possible change in sensor to something more low power.