Smart umbrella tracks air pollution

What if your umbrella could protect the world from air pollution, just as it protects you from the rain?

That is the purpose of a parasol, called the Sensing Umbrella, created by students from Institute of Applied Design of Copenhagen (Copenhagen Institut of Interaction Design) together with a magnificent Duo of Banzi Massimo (Massimo Banzi), a co-founder of Arduino (easy to use open hardware and software platform to create various electronic devices) and Giorgio Olivero (Giorgio Olivero) from Italian design company ToDo Design.

Massimo's Bansi has built a special microcontroller, with which the new umbrella measures the local value of the level of air pollution with carbon oxide and nitrogen dioxide.

After analyzing the data of the environment eye-catching design umbrella visualizes this data in real-time through a sparkling LED illumination on its surface.





Small lights, like fireflies, change their color and rhythm in accordance with the level of local pollution, thereby alerting people passing by on air quality.

All contamination data, including geographical location, are uploaded to the cloud – base pollution data for further analysis.

"Having used several of these umbrellas around the city, we hope to create a map of the area of polluted air," says Akarsh Sangha (Akarsh Sanghi), one of the student developers. This information will be publicly available on the web platform.





"As designers we wanted to join the revolution of "Internet of things" with a clear mission: to actively help people who use these connected devices," Sangha continues. His team wanted to create a tool that could help people discover new ways to service basic needs, such as physical and mental wellbeing, to feel protected and connected. Using brainstorming, they came up with the idea of turning an everyday object into a powerful tool for data collection.





"This project is completely based on open source hardware and software," says Sangha.

The team has no plans to monetize the project, or to open a commercial company. Instead, they hope to create a Union or a movement, which with the help of their new developed umbrella, or other wearable items, created on the basis of this project, everyone in society will play the role of a node in a larger network. Thus, each individual will collect environmental information and to communicate about the pollution for the common good.

They decided to make the whole design and the software open source so that other people can use this idea and share information.





In order to collect your own umbrella with led indication with analysis of the ambient air need not a lot, but not enough. You need to solder the Board and not to mount it on the dome of the umbrella, then to build vinyl suspension for battery, and also FLORA sensors that measure everything in your surrounding environment. This is a project of medium complexity, which requires a sufficient number of high-precision soldering in the Assembly of the led indicators. So stay away from caffeine and keep away your cat.



Source: facepla.net