Environmental data collection from sensor infrastructure

Abstract

As factors in the environment have the potential to have negative impact on our productivity and health, it is important for us to monitor environmental data and develop strategies or implement action to mitigate those negative impacts. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have the potential to provide us with such data as they can be be implemented easily at a low cost in our working environment. In this project, an implementation of WSN is designed and developed with 4 sensor nodes consisting of 4 different type of sensors. Raspberry Pi 3B is used as the sensor hub of the WSN while Wemos D1 Mini is used for the sensor nodes. The WSN is designed to be integrated into existing Wi-Fi network to keep cost down or as a standalone system. MQTT protocol is employed to reduce the bandwidth usage on an existing network and reduce power consumption of the sensor nodes. The WSN would also consist of a user-friendly interactive GUI made using Grafana, thereby enabling real-time data or recorded data could be displayed on a time graph. In addition, Grafana also provides the ability to send out an alert notification when a certain condition is reached.