SenSat – Remote Gas Monitoring

SenSat is a large didactic project aimed at developing and deploying systems for autonomous air quality monitoring in remote locations, such as mountain cabins and shelters in the Alps. The project was conducted in collaboration with schools as part of the ‘Alternating School and Work’ program for high school students, involving over 280 students. More details about the entire project can be found elsewhere: https://www.fbk.eu/en/event/fbk-junior-introduces-sensat/
The project is done within the activity of gas sensor research group in which I was responsible for the technical aspects of sensor operation and read-out.

The hardware component of the project involved the development of small modules equipped with gas sensors to monitor air quality. These modules are designed to provide a fast response in case of fire hazards by measuring CO2 levels.
Key aspects of the system architecture include:

  • the modules are designed for use in locations with limited access to power, necessitating optimization of energy consumption to ensure over a month of operation from batteries.
  • The systems are programmed and used by high school students, which limits the hardware selection to Arduino and Arduino-like platforms.
  • The LoRaWAN communication protocol was employed to gather sensor readings and transmit alerts over a range of 10km.
  • Multiple sensors are onboard for ambient monitoring, including CO2 concentration, pressure, and temperature.

With the participation of a select group of students who showed keen interest in the activities, we proceeded to develop a more advanced version with additional functions, both in terms of hardware and software. The extracurricular activities included:

  • Development of Integrated custom electronics (single board system)
  • Incorporation of additional sensors (humidity, noise, light)
  • Deployment of a custom MQTT server with a MySQL database to store all the data from the boards
  • Creation of a website to visualize and process the data from the database (using Node-Red)
  • Development of an app to provide access to the gathered data