Utah has a serious air quality problem. Working on this problem is a perfect place to find an intersection between the work of citizen scientists, activists, hobbyists, and maybe even politicians.

At MakeSaltLake, we are building a device that uses a beautiful little board called the esp8266 to connect to whatever wifi is nearby and make and deliver measurements constantly to a server. It's paired with a PM2.5 sensor that forces air through a chamber and points a laser through it to detect just how breathable the air would be. The resulting data is sent to a message queue on the internet and eventually compiled and analyzed.

We'll look at the devices, programming the firmware, and data collection all with the goal of making it usable enough to interest people in getting involved at a large scale. [100]

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