Air Quality Egg -- Part One

In an effort to keep stuff going I'm going to post little snippets and cap it all off with a kind of big review.

The Air Quality Egg (AQE) is definitely a hacker toy. There's a lot of stuff to play with once you get past the really basic results you get "out of the box". I actually started immediately by hacking it so I can't say for sure that it worked out of the box.

It takes me a little longer to get to the meat of the topic but I want to record my journey as much as anything. So sorry if a lot of this is a bit too obvious or simple. Hopefully, though, as I get more of the code and stuff that I've already put together out here this could be a good starting place for novice hackers. Face it, with electronics I'm still pretty newbie.

The AQE is built on the Nanode -- an Arduino compatible microcontroller. It has a built-in Ethernet because Nanode stands for "network application node".

Part One: Unpack
After all the stuff was unpacked I did a quick glance of the boards.

Figure 1: Overview

The "Egg Base Station" is the part that connects to the Internet and receives reports from the "Egg Remote Station" via radio signals. The "Egg Remote Station" has all the sensors that collect data.

My setup includes NO2, CO, Temperature, Humidity and Dust sensors.

Like I said, I took a really fast glance at the boards.

Figure 2: Egg Base Station

Figure 3: Remote Station and Dust Sensor (connected to Egg Remote Station)

Part Two: Hook it to My Computer and Update the Egg's Software (next)