Automatic wireless ambient air and weather condition monitoring system for outdoor environment monitoring applications

Abstract

Real-time, reliable, accurate, and comprehensive ambient air condition information over time is required in many fields and applications, including medical, scientific, and industrial applications as well as daily life human activities. Such information can be used to enhance the quality and living conditions of humans. Moreover, reliable, accurate, and comprehensive environment condition information helps in solving environmental problems. In this paper, we present a data logging and monitoring system to record air ambient conditions, air quality, and daily weather conditions using a low-cost, fully automated, wireless, real-time, reliable, continuous-logging, portable, and user-friendly device. The proposed device consists of two main parts: a monitoring device and a monitoring terminal. The monitoring terminal is based on an embedded system and a smart electronic sensor array to sense some environmental parameters such as ambient temperature, ambient relative humidity, ambient air pressure, carbon monoxide level, carbon dioxide level, gas methane level, dust particulate level, wind speed, wind direction, and rainfall. All parameter data are recorded in a data logger and displayed on a liquid crystal display (LCD). Environmental parameter data are sent to the monitoring terminal by a Bluetooth module. The parameter data is visualized on a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) application that can work on either a notebook or a smartphone platform. The test and validation show that the developed system successfully accomplished environmental condition logging and monitoring wirelessly. The environmental conditions were recorded and monitored by the developed system over a long period of time and in real time with a data transmission rate delay of 2.8 s from the monitoring device to the monitoring terminal.