Mountains - Air Quality Visualizer

From smog hanging over cities to smoke from wildfire, air pollution poses a major threat to our health. Visibility is easily impacted by air pollution. As we have more and more bad air days, we get more of blurry, hazy vision.

Using Visibility as an Indicator for Air Quality

We always use colors to indicate the air quality. In this concept, I added one more visual element—the visibility.

It has 4 layers of mountains which are made of acrylic sheets and 5 row of LED strips which light up the mountains and the wall behind it.

Not just color of the LED but also the number of lit LED strips constantly change, depending on the air quality. For instance, when the air quality is terrible, only the first row of LED turns on in red and all you can see is the silhouette of the first mountain.

• Base
• Wood board (10"x6",20T)
• Table Saw needed to make tracks
• Mountains
• Non translucent acrylic sheet (24"x12",3T)
• Color primer (White) needed to make non reflective light diffusing
• Circuit
• Adafruit Feather HUZZAH with ESP8266
• Five 10LED NeoPixel strip(WS2812B)
• Two 1K Ohm resistors
• Two Push buttons
• Jump wires

Process

• First, cut the wood board 10" by 6" and make 4 track slots for mountain layers.
• I used a table saw with adjustable height to make track slots
• Second, for clean wiring, drilling holes for wire management.
• On the right side, I made a deeper track for wiring and on the left side I drilled holes. In hindsight drilling holes is a better idea because vertical tracks might be very visible from certain angles.
• Third, solder all LED strips while they are temporally taped on the wood board.
• When soldering is done and attach LED strips on the wood board with double sided tape.
• If you have extra time, braid the power/data wire for tangle-free making process.

Now, let's move on to making the mountains.

https://www.tinkercad.com/things/dYWl0CKjpmp

• Laser Cutting
• I used 12" by 24" acrylic sheets. You can find the template(AI format) for laser cutting below.
• If you can, carve two set of mountains. Just in case for a botched paint job.
• Adding multiple layers of Primer
• Now you have mountains, it's time to work on ideal light diffusion. Acrylic sheets are very reflective by nature and they make unwanted reflection. Spray the color primer multiple times to build the layers on acrylic surface. Primer particles scatter the light beautifully as you can see the difference in the photos.

• Circuits
• https://www.tinkercad.com/things/dYWl0CKjpmp

• Codes
• Codes For demo
• First I prepared two set of codes for a demo. One with two push buttons and the other one with potentiometer.
• It has 5 modes for changing air quality.
• The color codes are different from AQI standard, because this concept is about celebrating great air quality not focusing on specifying how bad the air quality gets.
• Red : 1 row
• Yellow : 1, 2 row
• Green : 1, 2, 3 row
• Blue : 1, 2, 3, 4 row
• White : 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 row

In this step, we are going to make the Mountains work with real weather data.

• Go to openweathermap.org and make an account to use free API.
• We will use Air Pollution API which is provided for free. Since the number of call you can make is limited to 1M per month, make sure you are not calling it every millisecond.
• In the attached code, refreshing happens every 1.92 minute (115200 milli second).
• Okay now API ID is ready.

Now, let's open the code provided below.

• Wi-Fi info : on line 34 and 35, enter your wifi ssid and password
• Lat/Long info : on line 31 and 32, enter lat/long of your city
• To get latitude and longitude info of your city, go to latlong.net.
• API ID : on line 91, you can enter your API ID
• You can check your API ID on openweathermap.org website.

All set! Upload the code to feather board and in 1.92 minute, the mountains will show the air pollution status of your city.

The known issue

• We used FastLed library for this code and there seems to be a crash between FastLed library and Wi-Fi code. The first LED (i=0) lights up in different color and we could not fix it. For now, I put black duct tape on the first pixel, haha.

Special thanks to

• awesome Becky - Becky helped me with developing this concept from the very start.
• https://www.instructables.com/member/bekathwia/
• my friend HJ - HJ helped me with the coding.
• https://github.com/happyhj