Air Quality Egg is an open-source initiative that enables citizens to measure environmental conditions where they live. The project, a collaborative effort between designers, scientists, and citizens, grew out of workshops in New York City, Amsterdam, and London. From those conversations emerged an online wiki, the Google Group Air Quality Egg, and a community-prototyped Air Quality Egg system which consists of an outdoor sensor and an egg-shaped base station that wirelessly receives air quality data and has a visual display with real-time data updates. An online database continually collects data from all the Air Quality Eggs deployed in the world, and generates alerts, maps, and other creative applications using these measurements. The Air Quality Egg (AQE) is a collective, DIY, air quality sensor and network that emerged in 2012 out of an international collaboration of people involved in exploring aspects of the Internet of Things. The egg sensors measure concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and carbon monoxide (CO), because as noted on the project’s webpage, “they are the most indicative elements related to urban air pollution that are sense-able by inexpensive DIY sensors.” Although the egg can be implemented with other sensors, in this case the aspects of air quality that are measured depend on the technologies available.
