The nearest air monitor
might be miles away
Most cities rely on a small handful of regulatory-grade air quality stations, often spaced miles apart. That works fine for a broad regional picture, but it tells you almost nothing about the air on your specific block, especially if you live near a highway, an industrial corridor, or anywhere else official monitoring just doesn't reach.
That gap falls hardest on lower-income neighborhoods, which are frequently closer to pollution sources and furthest from monitoring infrastructure. Without local data, it's hard to even prove there's a problem, let alone advocate for fixing it.
BEACON is my attempt to close that gap: cheap, replicable hardware, deployed block by block, with the data made fully public rather than locked behind an agency's dashboard.
Solar + battery
A small solar panel keeps a rechargeable battery topped up, so each unit runs fully independent of the power grid, day or night.
Sense
A particulate sensor and a temperature/humidity sensor take a fresh reading on a short cycle, right at street level.
Upload
Each reading is sent over WiFi straight into a public database.
Publish
The live dashboard below updates automatically, so anyone can check current and historical air quality for a given sensor.
Live readings
Want a sensor
on your block?
BEACON is an ongoing, one-person project, every new sensor location, grant application, and design improvement happens in the open. If you'd like to follow along, suggest a deployment location, or just ask a question, reach out below. Or check out the Github at https://github.com/omarmushtaq-create/BEACON to create your own sensor!