Wireless Ultra-Low Cost CO2 Monitoring

Principal Investigator: Dr. Striegel, Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Project Summary: One of the major signs that has emerged with the COVID pandemic has been indoor air quality due to its airborne nature. Unfortunately, many of the continuous CO2 monitors are geared towards industrial applications costing hundreds of dollars or are standalone devices (e.g. desk clock) but still approach costs of nearly one hundred dollars. The focus of this work is to explore extremely low-cost, open source CO2 monitors that an individual could order / assemble on their own while offering rudimentary logging / wireless upload capabilities.

Student’s Role: Continue validation work of low-cost CO2 sensors and specify a low-cost / low-power approach with WiFi or Bluetooth capabilities along with a data-gathering back-end and accompanying web or smartphone interface. Stretch goals include the adoption of privacy-sensitive capabilities towards data storage.

Skills To Be Learned: Students will gain skills in C, Python, embedded devices (IoT), WiFi (802.11), and Bluetooth.  Further skills may include database storage / querying (SQL, Postgres) as well as REST API development.