We design and manufacture open-hardware low-cost air quality monitors. We sell and maintain very popular DIY air quality monitoring kits [1].
I think there are a few things that set us apart from other hardware startups:
- Most of our air quality monitors are open-source software and open-source hardware under CC license and we do NOT have any patents ;). All our code, drawings, schematics etc. are freely available on our website [2]. You can easily flash the monitor with your own software adjustments and point it e.g. directly to your home assistant server.
- Air pollution is one of the biggest environmental health risk and paradoxically the countries with the highest air pollution e.g. in Africa have the lowest dense network of air quality monitors. We try and keep our monitors as affordable as possible to enable disadvantaged communities and countries to monitor their air quality. Me and my co-founder are personally impacted by heavy air pollution and the first priority for us is to make an impact (and by making a good job, hopefully some profit).
- We are fully self-funded and were able to pull off the design & development by having an ideal set of prior experiences and skills, able to aquire customers at an early stage and enough own funds to reach that stage. Working from a low-cost base in Thailand also helped keeping costs down.
- We don't believe in prorietory algorithms and work transparently with many research partners in 4 continents to better understand the performance of low-cost air quality monitor. [3]
- You can read more about our journey and some of the unexpected things that happened in my blog post "Good Hardware Takes Time- The Journey of the AirGradient DIY Kit Production" [4]
We design and manufacture open-hardware low-cost air quality monitors. We sell and maintain very popular DIY air quality monitoring kits [1].
I think there are a few things that set us apart from other hardware startups:
- Most of our air quality monitors are open-source software and open-source hardware under CC license and we do NOT have any patents ;). All our code, drawings, schematics etc. are freely available on our website [2]. You can easily flash the monitor with your own software adjustments and point it e.g. directly to your home assistant server.
- Air pollution is one of the biggest environmental health risk and paradoxically the countries with the highest air pollution e.g. in Africa have the lowest dense network of air quality monitors. We try and keep our monitors as affordable as possible to enable disadvantaged communities and countries to monitor their air quality. Me and my co-founder are personally impacted by heavy air pollution and the first priority for us is to make an impact (and by making a good job, hopefully some profit).
- We are fully self-funded and were able to pull off the design & development by having an ideal set of prior experiences and skills, able to aquire customers at an early stage and enough own funds to reach that stage. Working from a low-cost base in Thailand also helped keeping costs down.
- We don't believe in prorietory algorithms and work transparently with many research partners in 4 continents to better understand the performance of low-cost air quality monitor. [3]
- You can read more about our journey and some of the unexpected things that happened in my blog post "Good Hardware Takes Time- The Journey of the AirGradient DIY Kit Production" [4]
[1] https://www.airgradient.com/kits/
[2] https://www.airgradient.com/open-airgradient/instructions/ov...
[3] https://www.airgradient.com/research/
[4] https://www.airgradient.com/blog/diy-pro-kit-journey/