Kanpur - A city of many resources but politically neglected

Showing posts with label embedded. Show all posts
Showing posts with label embedded. Show all posts

Saturday, November 2, 2019

NCR Air Pollution - Claming diwali not a contributor to NCR Air pollution problem would be wrong

NCR Air Pollution 

It would really be a stupid point if we claim that Diwali don't contribute to the pollution fiasco and our failure to control pollution. It would be more like giving a excuse of your stupidity by comparing it to the others, but i would also like to emphasis on the selective biasing of the people towards Diwali and all the fuzz around social media. Here is an article which talks about the major reasons contributing to the air pollution  and yes pollution due to fire crackers contribute significantly to this but air pollution start increase post diwali from October 25th  because of change in weather patters. 

People now days are more aware of the fact that air around them is polluted. You can verify this by looking at the increase in the sales number of Indoor Air purifier ( 18-25% increase in sales in winter season ) and that is the reason, people have moved away from burning crackers . Here is article which talk about post-diwali  AQI of 2018 and 2019 which was 642 in 2018 and 368 in 2019. Though this 2 year AQI don't define what will happen next year, but i think people know that this pollution is going to impact their children a lot and they don't want a bad future for their children's. What is needed is a reform on micro-level making people understand the impact of air pollution just like GOI has done for open defecation.

Diwali happened to be a festival during the start of winter season where temperature start decreasing, moisture content start increase and wind speed near the surface of the air decrease ( obvious as there is very little difference between the surface temperature and high altitude temperature ). We have observed this phenomenon in Bangalore while running a experiment. In the day time, the number of PM10 particles count ( 1 hour average - 3 minute sensing ) was lesser as compared to the night time and the reason behind this was ( as mentioned in the previously was presence of air moisture and warm air near the surface ( Bangalore is not too cold even in winters and thus there is some difference between the air near to the surface and air at 1000 meter height ) which is not the case in the NCR region.  I have done similar kind of experiment in Kanpur before Diwali and during Diwali. Below is the graph representing PM2.5 and PM10 values in outskirts of Kanpur in the month of June.


Here is the link to the trail of tweets during my experiment of Air Quality last year in the month of November. I wanted to extend this experiment by deploying more number of static air quality monitor in Kanpur just like Skymet has done now in Delhi i.e. monitoring hyper-local air quality in Delhi and doing analysis along with other factors like Temperature, Humidity and density of vehicles in the vicinity thus reaching a conclusion if peak time impact the air pollution. Here is the link to Skymet android app. This kind of experiment will help the local government to find the sources of pollution and then take measures to reduce it. I am not going to point out possible solution to this problem because i think there are people with far more knowledge and experience but i think, evey individual has to contribute their bit in the fight against the pollution. I have done my bit by saying big NO to crackers from last 3 years and i have plans to do local workshops in Kanpur to raise awareness towards  pollution.


Now coming to the reason behind writing a articles on air pollution all of sudden, one friend of mine asked a very valid question that where all this pollution goes. I have some understanding that heavy particles eventually settle down but what about other gaseous pollutants like NO2, SO2, PM1 and PM2.5? I am raising this question to all the experts out there to help me understand what happen to the produced pollution? Does it literally settle down ? We all know the hole in Ozone layer. I read a really interesting article which discussed in detail about how Particulate matter settle down indoor, but i am not sure if that stand true for outdoor.

Link to a online book for those who want to under particulate material in depth ( no i didn't went through it ).



I am contributing my bit to fight against Air pollution and would request all those who are reading this article to spread awareness about Air pollution at their level. 

Belated Happy Diwali to all. 




Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Home Automation using Raspberrypi - One of the most interesting application of IOT.

Home Automation using IOT 

Hello friends. Starting a new technical blog series on home automation using IOT (Internet of Things). And this time not something like which i had done a long time back i.e. control a AC appliance(refrigerator) using a SIM900 GPRS module, Arduino UNO and text SMS and later tested the same with HC-05 bluetooth module and an android application. This story started a long time back (almost 3.5 years back), when i started working with Rajeev on a remote basis and we were developing "some" home automation device - something like Wemo Switch from Belkin.  And no wonder, we were able to control the device. I lost the video though or other wise i would have uploaded it here. 

Wemo switch from Belkin
Side View of proposed device

front view of proposed device
How it look in actual
At that point of time, building such thing was more of your passion rather than building a startup out of it. You do a lot of research for sales, hardware and even take stupid decisions (like buy a electric imp device and then loose it somewhere, Rajeev was so angry!!!!). 

But now when you had some hold-on on the hardware, you understand things a bit more, you understand what a product which can be used by general public and users is, you can clearly differentiate the DIY and a "product". So what i am trying to write about here is a DIY project which probably only i will use but yes, i can feel that this will be useful for me. Now question is why am writing a blog on home-automation and why even i am doing this when a lot of people have done this earlier and my answer is "out of curiosity and to apply IOT in day-to-day life and make things easy " I am designing it for myself as i am planning to do some Agriculture / Hydroponics related stuff at my home and in that, i would require some thing like continuous monitoring and remote control and secondly sometime i become too much lazy that after reading a book, i don't want to get-up from the bed and turn the light "OFF".

Company where i presently work do continuous monitoring but that is what i call as "Product" because 100's of people use it on a daily basis and what i am trying to create here is more of my personal usage i.e. it will not be required to handle "x" amount of traffic, i will not write workers queues to manage different jobs, i will not optimise my Mysql performance, i will not use a time series DB, i will not use any kind of load balancing stuff here and not even two layer authentication for API's (yes when you work in a startup with guys like Rajeev - you know some stuff about web-designing also). 

So this time, i would create a small home automation using a combination of 
  1. RPI
  2. WiFi / Ethernet 
  3. Bluetooth
  4. A 5V 230 V relay, some other hardware 
  5. And an simple web / android application
I will try to go as much as detail in possible (there are many existing home automation projects in net and here is one of the link) and will push code to a  git repository . I will start first with controlling a AC appliance with RPI GPIO and later on i will try to make RPI as a hub and communicate to the other switched via Bluetooth or other communication options. I will try to do this systematically and will keep on adding the information here also.  In-fact i already started coding a bit for web-application and made a small web-page using MDL (Material Design Lite). Although the UI don't seems to be good, but i am working on it and will try to make it more aesthetically pleasing. 


A sample UI for the home automation project using MDL

I will divide this blog into some parts

1. Web-application
2. Hardware
3. Android Application - Will take help of my brother Ravi who is a Android Developer 
4. Complete set-up
5. Introducing bluetooth in the scene for making RPI as hub.