Air Quality Egg crowdsources hyper-local pollution data

Pachube has launched a device that senses nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide that, when hooked up to the internet, will help to generate a crowdsourced air quality map.
The Air Quality Egg is a Kickstarter project that was born out of open data web service Pachube's community meetups. The London, New York and Amsterdam communities teamed up to create a way for citizens to participate in a conversation about air quality. They felt that government air quality data was not granular enough to be able to understand the local dynamics of pollution that could affect you. The official maps -- such as those supplied by Defra -- are better for regional insights.
The Air Quality Egg consists of a small electronic sensing system that can be plugged into the wall that is designed to sit outside your home to take regular readings. It has an RF transmitter that sends the hyper-local data wirelessly to an egg-shaped base station inside. This then relays that data to the internet via an ethernet connection. The data will then feed into Pachube which will store and give open access to the data. That data can then be used by developers to build applications, mashups and maps.
The Egg's sensor system has been prototyped and refined several times. The current iteration has been designed by Joe Saavedra, building on work from a previous project Citizensensor.cc. A company called WickedDevice designed the wireless system and will manage the production of the device.
People can pledge anywhere from $1 (£0.63) to more than $2,500 (£1,575) to the project, although you'll have to pledge more than $40 (£25) in order to get some of the sensor components for DIY assembly and more than $100 (£63) to get a fully-assembled Air Quality Egg.
At the time of writing, the project had 108 backers and had raised around $9,000 (£5,670) of its $39,000 (£24,580) target.
You can find out more about the history of the project on Pachube's blog or head on over to the Kickstarter page if you want to pledge.

Thank you : www.wired.co.uk/