Design and Requirements of a Low Cost Air Monitoring Hardware Platform for Android Phones

SenseDroid is a DIY citizen sensing platform for smart-phones. The overall project involves building a mobile sensor platform which gathers and reports information about the environment (air quality, radio-activity, noise, etc.) to citizens, scientists and city stakeholders.

Martin Jaschkowitz defended his thesis on the „Design and Requirements of a Low Cost Air Monitoring Hardware Platform for Android Phones“ last week. He focused on the hardware part of the SenseDroid project. This involved, developing a low-cost and easy to build sensor platform which can be connected to Android phones to gather information about the environment. He analyzed hardware aspects such as sensors or board alternatives, as well as energy/battery management, software issues, and communication with phones.

Martin produced the following prototype:

Overview of the components of the SenseDroid platform

A designers‘ friendly programming toolkit for smartwatches.

Dominik Paluch presented last week his work on making Processing sketches run on the Wimm One smartwatch. His work involved doing a survey of existing smartwatches on the market, and a survey of smartwatches developers‘ needs.

We picked the Wimm One as it is a Standalone watch (doesn’t have to be connected to a phone), it runs Android and comes with and interesting set of inputs (sensors + capacitive touch screen).

Dominik reviewed a set of developing environments for non-trained programmers: Scratch, Alice, Processing, App Inventor… And decided to extend the Alpha version of Processing for Android.

The project is available on Google Code, Dominik modified the Processing IDE, its compiler to Android and developed code to support native Wimm One gestures, further developed a set of Processing Libraries facilitate access to the accelerometer data, the magnetometer data and support custom gestures input.