About a week ago, I wrote a blog post about air quality and CO2 sensors as a way to help make more informed decisions about going into rammed devrooms when at conferences like FOSDEM. This is an update on what I’ve learned since, with links to active projects, interested devrooms, and other such goodies.
First of all, the live notes doc that anyone can write to for future coordination
This might be a terrible idea, but…
I’ve created a publicly accessible, editable-by-anyone page where I’m trying to keep track of projects, interested groups running FOSDEM dev rooms and so on.
The read-only view is at – https://pad.public.cat/s/tnvBWsNZv, and there is a link to edit it if you want to contribute to some useful information to it. Please bear in mind the guidance on contributing and intended audience, before making changes!
Next, FOSDEM has a bunch of people running rooms who are either interested, or planning to bring sensors and make this data available
I was surprised by the response, and how many people either interested in doing so, or already planning to make this information visible to attendees.
That’s why I stated making that public document linked earlier. Now that I understand that:
- there is interest
- getting sensor data online isn’t impossible given how good the wifi typically is at FOSDEM
- much of the software for aggregating readings and charting them is open source software, and available as a free / cheap hosted service from providers like Grafana Cloud and so on.
I think it’s actually possible to have a least a handful of rooms with live data available, both to people inside the room, but also to people looking up the room online, to decide to go there.
Making an reasonable accurate, internet connected CO2 sensor is less expensive than I first thought
I came across a number projects on the internet where people were building indoor CO2 trackers, and had shared their instructions for doing so, using:
- specially designed co2 sensors. There’s one, a Sensirion SCD40 / SCD41 that keeps coming up.
- relatively cheap connected micro computers, like Raspberry Pi or ESP32
- open source software for making charts available (influx db , grafana, etc)
I’ve totally been nerd sniped, and ordered a sensor and ESP32 myself, to try making one of these. I’ve listed links to them in the public doc above.
It’s probably something you want to speak to specialists if you want to do it properly though.
That said, there’s a lot be to said for having a consistent approach with some form of centralised data. While it might work to have a bottom up approach for a sprawling event like FOSDEM, if there are a smaller number of rooms to set up with sensors, there are organisations like Eventinfra for community focussed tech events.
Companies like DevTank who sponsor the development of OpenSmartMonitor, and have built deployable hardware (and their own Youtube channel showing it all off) also do this on a commercial basis.
Public health concerns at conferences are a still real blocker to participation
This is hardly news, but while in-person events are now a thing again since the Pandemic lockdowns, I kept coming across folks who used to attend events, but still don’t, and effectively feel shut out now.
One of the clearest examples of this is the virtual event, https://fluconf.online, which appears to have been set up out of frustration with FOSDEM, but also events like this in general.
Anyway, most of the juicy links are in that public, freely editable pad – go check it out, and if you’ll be at FOSDEM, drop me a line if you’d like to say hi!
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