Hi! I’m am about to get my own sensor and I wanted to know if I’ll be able to get data from my sensor using the data download tool without spending my API points.
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This article should help:
https://community.purpleair.com/t/view-local-sensor-output-over-wifi/5513
Try just: http://your_IP_address/
Finding your sensor IP address is a little tricky. One way is to connect to your wireless router settings page and look for something like “connected devices” or “clients” which should show the wireless device Names, MAC addresses and IP addresses. The sensor name should be something like PurpleAir-xxxx where xxxx is the last 4 digits of the sensor MAC address.
However, I don’t know if it counts against API points. I don’t think so because all the traffic stays on your LAN and does not go over the internet. However, this will need to be verified by someone who knows more about how points work.
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Hi Jeff!
Thank you so much for this information. I’ll try this option ones I have installed my sensors.
Cheers
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Yes, using http://ip of your sensor/json works great, you can usually just look up the IP of your sensor on your wifi router.
Those calls don’t count against anything, they are fully local and will work even if your internet connection is down. I have been using those for several years for my indoor and outdoor sensors, with excellent reliability.
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What if I am not close to my sensors? Can I check them remotely? I have a couple of sensors installed at volunteers’ houses around the city. I would like to access all data without having to go in person.
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For remote access, using the Purple Air cloud API is the simpler solution for sure.
If you are willing to do some development, it shouldn’t be very difficult to have a local computer - even a low powered raspberry pi or esp32 will be good for this - query the /json endpoint on a regular basis and forward the data to a central location, this won’t interfere with Purpleair. But this means maintaining those extra computers, the central database, etc. Fun if you are into that sort of thing, but a burden otherwise 
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Hi @ValeA
What the others in this thread have said is all correct. You can always access data locally over JSON. I feel it is also important to note that we do not intend to make sensor owners pay for the data from their own sensors. Until we get a more permanent solution in place, we will give sensor owners points to cover the cost of their own uses. If you are concerned about the points cost of obtaining the data from those volunteer house sensors, send an email to contact@purpleair.com and we will work with you.
For other ways to obtain sensor data, you can view our How to Obtain Sensor Data article.
@Kieran I’m curious to learn more about covering the cost of obtaining data from my own sensor. After the history API became limited I set up a script to push data into Amazon Timestream. I gather that’s no longer necessary, but I left it in place since I had already built the solution and it does reduce API load.
After the points system was implemented this stopped working, so I switched to pulling data locally. This also works, but it depends on knowing the LAN IP address of my sensor which is subject to change if my router gives it a different address after a restart. For this reason I would prefer to go back to using the PA API for retrieving data or at least have a way to get the LAN IP address of a sensor from PurpleAir when the script starts up.
Additionally, there seems to be a bug in the API site at developer.purpleair.com. It shows a million points available on my default organization, but it looks like the initial points allocation was depleted as I’m getting “Payment is required to make this api call.”
I tried adding points, which resulted in the web interface showing two million points but calls are still failing with the same error message regarding payment.
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Hi @Dan,
Points are in your API account, but they must be moved to a project in order to be useable by your keys. This can be done by following the steps in our New API Dashboard article. If you are using the API to retrieve data from your own sensor, please send an email to contact@purpleair.com and we can provide points to assist you.
You can also use a DHCP Reservation to ensure your sensor is always assigned the same IP address. This should make querying your sensor locally much easier. The exact steps for setting up a DHCP Reservation will depend on your router.
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