Outdoor Air Quality Monitor

According to the World Health Organization, more than 90% of the people breathe unhealthy air. Air pollution is the biggest driver of premature death of all environmental health risks. With climate change and the warming of the planet, air pollution, e.g. through wildfires are also increasingly becoming a major issue in regions with previously very clean air.

Air quality can quickly fluctuate between good and unhealthy levels and thus a dense network of air quality monitors ensures that people know when they need to protect their health. The Open Air outdoor monitor keeps you always informed about the air you breathe.

The monitor measures PM1, PM2.5, PM10, Temperature and Humidity. In future we will offer options with TVOC and CO2 sensors. The standard version uses two independent particle sensors with integrated temperature and humidity sensors.

This monitor focuses on measuring particulate matter, especially PM2.5. PM2.5 has the potential to cause significant harm to our well-being. These tiny particles are released into the air through various sources such as vehicle emissions, industrial activities, burning of fossil fuels or wildfires. When inhaled, PM2.5 particles can penetrate deep into our respiratory system, leading to a range of health issues. Long-term exposure to PM2.5 has been linked to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, including asthma, bronchitis, heart attacks, and even premature death.

The Open Air constantly measures the air quality and informs you when the air becomes unhealthy, and you should take protective measures.

We work very closely with a number of leading universities on air quality monitoring and our monitor has been selected for the largest study of classroom air quality in the world due to its performance and affordability. You can read more about our work with research institutions on our research page.

The AirGradient Open Air monitor is unique as it gives you full flexibility on how you want to monitor and use the data. Being open-source you are not locked in to any specific data platform but can connect the data to any server, i.e. Home Assistant or use the AirGradient data platform - a data platform specifically made for air quality monitoring.

This gives you complete ownership and freedom of your data and our community has built a number of extensions to existing data platforms, e.g. home assistant with ESPHome.

Of course you can also use the AirGradient dashboard that is already pre-flashed on the monitor and very easy to setup.

This powerful dashboard lets you immediately see the air quality and environmental status of multiple locations. Built for speed and scale. You can set up specific alerts and are notified automatically if air quality is exceeds your defined ranges.

Get powerful daily and weekly reports detailing the air quality of each location, providing you with a clear, concise summaries at a glance.

Outdoor monitors can also be displayed on the AirGradient Map and you can opt-in to share your outdoor data with openAQ, a non-profit with the mission to deomocritize air quality data and make it freely available.

If you use the AirGradient data platform, you can opt-in to share your outdoor data with the public and openAQ. OpenAQ is a non-profit organisation collecting and organizing worldwide air quality data and making it available for the public and research. Your data is then also available on the AirGradient map together with thousands of other monitors from openAQ.

The kit is very easy to assemble, and you can also get the monitor as fully assembled version. We provide detailed instructions and videos on how to connect the monitor to your WiFi network and set it up on the dashboard and map. If you run into any problem, just contact us directly and we are happy to help. You can also ask questions in the AirGradient Forum and get valuable tips from the community.

The monitor can be mounted on walls or poles. For pole mounting, use two stainless steel zip ties and feed them through the zip tie holders. Alternatively you can use two screws and mount the monitor on a wall. To prevent theft, there is a small hole on the monitor that you can use with a secure screw to prevent the monitor from easily taken off.

The enclosure is fully weather proof so it can be mounted being exposed to the elements.

The enclosure has been designed with two primary goals, firstly to ensure accurate measurements of the air quality and secondly to be robust and long lasting.

For accurate measurements it is important that there is a good airflow to the sensor modules, that air loops in front of the sensor modules are avoided and that the risk of condensation inside the enclosure is as much as possible reduced.

The enclosure itself is very robust and consists of high quality ASA plastic that gives an excellent durability as well as UV protection.

The open-hardware / open-source nature of the monitor allow easy changes and additions on the firmware as well hardware. The board is powered by an ESP32-C3-MINI microcontroller that is easy to program with a wide eco-system and has integrated WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities.

The ESP32 can directly be flashed through the USB C port and thus changes in the open-source firmware can easily be done.

For the ones, who would like to make adjustments to the monitor, there are breakout pins available for I2C and three additional IOs. In addition, you can repurpose the two UARTs. The board provides both, 5 and 3.3 volts.

We integrated an external hardware watchdog chip that automatically reboots the unit in case something goes wrong and thus the monitor can achieve high up times.