A few weeks ago, my friend and neighbor Jérôme (aka lavamind) installed a weather station on his balcony and started collecting data from it.
It has been quite useful to measure the degrading air quality during the recent forest fires plaguing northern Canada, but sadly, the hardware itself isn't great.
Whereas some projects like airgradient offer open hardware devices running free software, the station we got is from RevolvAir, some kind of local air monitoring project that aims to be a one-stop solution for exterior air monitoring.
Not only is their device pretty expensive1, but it also reboots frequently by itself. Even worse, their online data map requires an account to view the data and the interface is bad, unintuitive and only stores data up to a month.
Having a good background in data visualisation and statistics thanks to my master's degree in economics, I decided I could do better. Two days later, I had built a series of tools to collect, analyse and graph the JSON time series data provided by the device.
The result is a very simple website that works without any JavaScript, leveraging static graphs built using R. Modern web libraries and projects offer an incredible wealth of tools to graph and visualise data, but as for most of my web projects, I wanted something static and simple.
The source code for the project can be found here, and although it is somewhat specific to the data structure provided by the RevolvAir device, it could easily be adapted to other devices, as they tend to have very similar JSON dumps.
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around 300 CAD, whereas a similar station from airgradient costs around 90 CAD. Thankfully, this station was a gift from a local group mobilising against an industrial project near our housing cooperative and we didn't have to pay for it ourselves. ↩