Hello everyone, I am new to the community and really appreciating this forum. I have some questions about contribution of ‘non-standard’ data to Sensor.Community, and whether it would be useful or advisable.
The University where I work has a few commercial AQ sensors, and where appropriate, we would really like to be able to contribute the PM10 and PM2.5 data that we are recording to Sensor.Community, along with data from standard SC kits, which we will contribute using the existing firmware. We have some Plume Flow 2 sensors (https://plumelabs.com/en/flow/) with an SDS011 sensor, and two Zephyrs (https://www.earthsense.co.uk/zephyr) which have a Shinyei or Alphasense R1 PM sensor (TBC).
What I am wondering is whether this data would be useful to the community? I understand that the SC database structure is not set up for mobile data, as a single location is implicit in the registration of the sensor- but if we use some of our commercial sensors for static recording, in theory we could register them and push their data using the API. However, since the data from both Zephyrs and Flows is quite extensively modelled and adjusted by the time we can retrieve it from their servers, it might be misleading and do more harm than good. At the very least we would need to supply a flag identifying the data as being from a different type of sensor, so I was interested to see @bessarabov’s new API documentation with the questions about flags for different sensor types.
What are the opinions / insights of the forum community? I would be very interested to hear from anyone else who is trying to combine or compare commercial and open-source options.
Thanks for your patience, if you read this far, and I look forward to future conversations!
Lucy
