Data from my own sensor

Data
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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 AIP poits.

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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 AIP 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 :wink:

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