NoxDroid on a ride in the inner city of Copenhagen.
NOxDROID v 0.1
The NOxDROID was presented today to our teachers and fellow students at ITU. The project paper was also handed in and can hopefully be submitted for CHI 2012.
Overall the we are quite content with the outcome, and intend to keep on working on the NOxDROID. It is still in an early alpha version 0.1 with a lot of technical issues to deal with.
First of all we need to look at the recording of data. Currently the locationtracking is using both Skyhook (network and cell towers) and the phoe's own location services (gps, network, cell towers) resuting in redundancy and many identical location readings. Both updateintervals and accuracy need to be tuned to the needs of the application.
A lot can be done to reduce redundancy by tuning parameters but a better dataprocessing and cleaning is also necessary when generating kml data for the map overlay. The amount of kml data that can be rendered by google maps javascript api is limited. Hence we might need to process the data further to fit the web based visualization.
Other challendes of the visualization includes overlay of overlapping data for a given time span. This includes averaging over geospatial clusterings of data. This could possibly be done using the GeoModel of the Google's App Engine to do geospatial queries by proximity or the bounding box model.
NOxDroid in test
The NOxDROID is almost ready. The android app is ready and so is the sensor ingeniously fitted inside a retro bike light along with the IOIO board.
NOxDROID App is alive
Some screenshots from the NOxDROID android app
 Main screen |
 After pressing the GPS icon |
 After pressing the IOIO icon |
 After pressing the connectivity icon |
 Uploading tracks to the cloud |
 Peference screen |
 Output from the Logcat |
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Using the singleton pattern Android
We have three services writing to the SQLite in the NOxDROID android app.
- NOxDroidIOIOThread
- Location tracking
- NOxDroidService
NOxDROID in color
We did a video scenario of the use of NOxDROID using a simple paper prototype. The purpose of the scenario is to convey the general idea of the project and the context in which NOxDROID can be used. Preliminary mockups of the interface is also a part of the visualization of the scenario.
Making sense of sensing
Stine had a meeting Friday at COWI (a Danish Engineering Consultancy Company) about sensing air pollution. Some problems with our current project proposal arose.
O3, temperature and NO2 are important factors in air pollution.
It is a bit unclear whether the sensor we have ordered (MQ-135) is actually able to detect NO2. The data-sheet is not very specific, only refering the to general category of nitrogen oxides, NOx.
Another project, AIR (http://www.pm-air.net/) very similar to ours used sensors from citytech, so possibly we have to change the type of sensor we are going to use.