Frequently Asked Questions

What is pulse.eco?

pulse.eco is an IoT platform and an Environmental Sustainable Development solution. It gathers all the environmental data provided by a LoRaWAN / WiFi sensor installation and other third-party sources, and visualizes the generated information in a easy to understand and navigate method.

What is the goal of pulse.eco?

This project in not yet another air quality observation portal, but a broader solution designed to serve multiple purposes:

• a monitoring portal for exploring different aspects of the environmental conditions in your city

• credible source for tackling city environmental issues by using modern machine learning and statistics methods

• early warning system for improving the citizens life and preventing environmental-caused troubles or disasters

• central but open system for storing and retrieving city-wide environmental data

• an actual implementation of a whole stack IoT system which should improve the knowledge, impact and the popularity of IoT technologies

Besides all this, pulse.eco is intended to be an evolving platform. We hope to get great reception from the community, ideas for improvement and new features, and of course, actual results, to make your city a better place to live.

How does it work?

The core of the system is the n-things platform, tuned and customized as pulse.eco. It's comprised of several pieces, i.e. containerized building blocks, which are easily scalable, efficient and robust:

• core IoT Platform, which handles the device management, API, data-flow and general services

• pulse.eco specifics which turn n-things into a SmartCity solution

• Apache Cassandra as data storage, ready for massive data handling and distribution

• multiple interfaces for data collection and dispatching: HTTP(s), CoAP, MQTT.

• adapters for different LoRaWAN providers, such as TheThingsNetwork, LORIOT and Swisscom

• specific adapter for interfacing with the MOEPP Air Quality system

• data analytics plugins for easy statistics, extracting correlations and time-series forecast

As for the sensor installations, three mediums for communication are used:

• LoRaWAN via TheThingsNetwork (for the LoRaWAN sensors)

• Secured web transport (for the WiFi sensors)

• Third party sensor data integrations via secured channels

Cool video describing the architecture of SkopjePulse (predecessor of pulse.eco) as well as TheThingsNetwork was shot as part of the ThisIsMyArchitecture series from Amazon Web Services. You can watch the video on YouTube.

Which components are the pulse.eco DIY sensors based on?

The central Micro Controller Unit used depends on the type of the communication for the device:

• ATmega 328p on board of the Arduino Nano working alongside with Microchip RN2483 transmitter for the LoRaWAN version of the devices

• TheThingsUno board for the second version of the LoRaWAN devices

• ESP8266 (ESP-12) on board of the NodeMCU devkit 1.0 for the WiFi version of the devices

The measurement components used in the pulse.eco sensors are:

• SDS011 / SDS021 PM sensor

• DHT22 Temperature and Humidity sensor

• Grove Temperature, Humidity and Air Pressure sensor BME280 or BME680

• Grove Sound Sensor

The data received from the sensors are not manipulated in any manner, except the Sound sensor which levels the sound envelope recorded to a spectrum of 0-255.

Is the data manipulated?

Most of the data is being stored and displayed as reported by the source sensors. Such data values are: PM10, PM2.5, PM1, Temperature, Humidity, AirPressure.

The data from the pulse.eco devices for the ambiental noise comes in raw 'units' measure which corresponds to the sound pressure reflected into output voltage of the sensor. That level is then passed through a filter which estimates the noise level in dBA based on the same sound pressure level measured on outdoor traffic scenario.

Some third party sensors also report gas presence in ppb (parts per bilion). That value is transformed where needed into ug/m3 by using a proper calculation which takes into account the molecular weight, ambiental temperature and air pressure.

What is the precision of the data coming from the pulse.eco devices

All of the sensors come with factory data sheets representing their statistical precision and error margin. See the links above for the details.

Some summed up details:

• SDS011: Max of +/- 15% and offset +/- 10 ug/m3 (at 25C, 50% RHD). Bear in mind that due to high humid conditions, the sensor can detect water droplets in the air and report them as particles, effectively reading marginally increased PM values. Some platforms apply a filter on the SDS data based on the humidity data, but that one as well might be prone to errors, so we decided to just display the exact read values and avoid futher confusion and explnations.

• DHT22: humidity: +/- 2-5%; temperature: +/- 0.5C. However, they are known for easy to be 'tainted' and sometimes continously to report much different values.

• BME680 / BME280: Pressure: +/- 1hPa; Humidity: +/- 3%RH; Temperatur: +/- 1C

Can I use the data?

Yes, all the data is publicly available via a RESTAPI.

How can I join?

If you want to own a sensor, and make sure it works properly, follow the instructions in the construct section.

If you want to add your city to the pulse.eco map, see if you can start your pulse.eco community.