Hey all 
, with wildfire season kicking off again I just finished a small project to link my home’s sensor to my Philips Hue Lights to automatically update based on the air quality!
Take a look here: PurpleAirHueIntegration
I have this setup to run on my RaspberryPi every 15m and it has been working well so far.
Hi there.
I’m really interested in what you’ve done.
What I’d really like to do is display the current AQI reading from my Purple Air sensor. At my letter box or similar. Just inside my property boundary. Sort of like the roadside displays of current temperature. I’m hoping to build awareness of the state of our air quality.
Can you help with this?
Thanks Andre
Bunbury Western Australia
andreroukens@gmail.com
Sure, that sounds easily doable. You would need some sort of device to fetch the sensor data and then update your roadside display. My repo converts the sensor data into AQI. You could do something similar for your sign.
That’s terrific. What sort of device would I need to fetch the data? Is that computer with a script running?
I personally use a Raspberry Pi, but yes it could just be a computer running a script every 10-15 minutes.
Hi Jesse.
Sorry to bother you again, but I’m probably going to need a bit of help with this.
Would I be better off with a PI device or would a standard computer be sufficient?
I’m also looking at an LED display on eBay (https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/172941615840) and the seller advised me that I would have to type the data in manually. Surely a script could handle that as well? I think it has a USB connection.
If you are able to help me with this I’m sure that there’s going to be other people interested in displaying AQI readings or a scrolling message such as “the current air quality is very good, good, poor, very poor, hazardous (depending on the actual reading)”.
Maybe I could get one of these LED displays sent to you (if you’re willing)?
I really want people in my area to become aware of just how poor our air quality is. That’s about my only hope forward.
Thanks Andre
I took a look at that product and I get the sense that they expect you to pre-program in various different displays. It’s hard to say what that product’s limitations are without seeing a manual. It’s possible they let you send updates via USB but it would need to be able to support dynamic updates.
Generally speaking you would need some sort of internet connected PC, laptop, raspberry PI, etc. to run a script similar to my project to fetch and parse the AQI data. Then the script should be able to output to a LED device.
As a side note, I’m located in the USA so shipping would more expensive if you wanted to send me one to test!
Hi Jesse.
I’ve received my panel. So far it seems perfect for the task. I can create and save different messages to display. So for any reading I can have a message to suit. We have an AirQualityIndex here for readings within a particular range. Very Good, Good, Poor, Very Poor & Hazardous. These messages can be sent from a LED display app. I’ve just been using LED Art from my android phone via WiFi and it works well. I think that the panel will work with any of these types of apps. Once the message is loaded it will run until the next message is loaded or stopped. Each message can have it’s own colour, text type, scroll speed, whatever. The panel must have its own memory as it will run the last message automatically when repowered.
So I just need to get the sensor reading, select the appropriate message and send it to the display. That’s the part I’m going to struggle with. I just need to know the best way to achieve that.