The problem AQI.CO.IN solves
Problem Statement:
- Traditional climate data gathering methods are no longer scalable
- Lack of high-resolution climate data is hampering climate response
- Lack of reliable climate data poses a challenge for climate adaptation
Solution:
- Open-source climate data collection and incentivize participants
- Empower local communities to collect real-time high-res climate data
- Democratize access to climate data for an effective climate response
- Broader participation to achieve consensus and innovate on climate response
- Empower Climate Adaptation with Reliable and Standardized Data
- Optimize businesses and safeguard sensitive communities using micro-trends
Challenges we ran into
- Building a low cost Open Source AQI Monitor requires a few trial and errors. We encountered challenges in measuring the PM2.5 density either due to a faulty sensor or lack of proper know-how using the sensor.
- Getting the GPS module to work under the roof was a herculean task, but we seem to have achieved a location fix with the satellites.
- Packing up these sensors and microcontrollers are still a challenge and we look forward to collaboration with others in the community
- Storing climate datapoints on IPFS only returns a CID. However, this lacks enough metadata to stitch together a bigger picture. We had to develop a simple CRUD interface above the IPFS Shell to manage this in a RDMS manner.
- On the deployment side, we faced minor tailwind configuration issues which was showing up in Vercel but not on Localhost. We solved it by using exportdefault instead of module.exports
- To forecast the AQI data, we experimented with a few models like SARIMAX, Weatherbench2, and llama8b. We rain into some issues like inabilities getting real-time data. To fix this, we resorted to SARIMAX and checked for accuracy using SciKit-Learn.
- We setup GaiaNet bot as a chatbot. But we were not able to receive reliable forecasts in realtime.
Additional Features
- Fixing our old hardware setup and making them independent of (Serial) programmers
- Placing some checks in the sensors before commiting datapoint
- Moving the incentive module from RasPi to a central API
- Developing a new Analytics/Leaderboard page ranking reward winners, device activity, and cities with cleaner air
- Fixing our dashboard page (Removing Dark Mode and making the site further responsive)
- Added a Chatbot interface in the dashboard powered by Gaianet
- Development of our own forecaster model