Particulate Matter Sensor – Store Data in BigQuery

The project luftdaten.info by Code for Germany enables people to build a particulate matter sensor and measure the air qualitiy. The firmware that runs on the sensor has the option to send the data also to an own API.

The Google Cloud Function stores the sensor data together with a timestamp in BigQuery. The sensor data in BigQuery can be easily analyzed. As an example a reported created with Data Studio accessing that data:

Setup Cloud Function

Local Development

Create a virtual environment

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

Install the dependencies

pip install --requirement requirements.txt

Deployment

Deploy the Cloud Function

make deploy

Setup sensor

Configuration

• Open the configuration page of the senor

• Enable the option Send data to custom API with the settings

  Optional	Value
  Server	europe-west1-GCP-PROJECT.cloudfunctions.net
  Path	/pm_sensor_storage
  Port	80

Note: The firmware supports HTTPS, but the sensor crashes for larger SSL certificates because of the limited memory. (Source)