Heya @Ethan,
Yeah, I’ve had a similar feeling about them all being a bit fragmented.
I added observations to Raven App for quite a while and I was sad to see it shut down. I’m glad that Airspot is preserving it.
I spent the last couple of days trying out Airspot, CO2trackers, and indoorco2map so that I could write about these fairly:
I think that the Airspot map looks really nice right now. Using Mapbox as a mapping platform is a great solution and it makes the interface very friendly to look at. I also love that Airspot is displaying CO2trackers and Raven App data. Its nice to have some integration. I know that the map is very new, so I’m sure it will get some more work in the future, but there are a few things that could be improved. I don’t have an Airspot device, so I can’t test it, but I assume that submitting data from a connected Airspot is pretty easy, however, submitting from non-airspot devices is manual and a bit of work. Also, while the data are open, it would be nice to have a button that makes it easy to download them, so that they could be analyzed for research.
CO2trackers has been around for a long time and I commend the work that went into it, but I don’t think it does anything very well. Visually, its not great, and its clunky in general. It also makes the name of the person who submitted the observation and the serial number of their device public, which I think is a bit dangerous.
Indoorco2map.com is a bit different and focuses on collecting what I’ll call “research grade” data. Observations have to be at least 5 CO2 readings long (ie the sensor has to sample the air five times). On most sensors, that means the recording takes 5 minutes to do (although an Airspot set to a 5 second polling interval could do it in a minute). Its a drag to have to stand around in a shop for 5 minutes, but it does mean that the data is much more reliable and less noisy than Airspot and CO2trackers which only report a single CO2 reading (correct me if I’m wrong). Another benefit is that you can see how different parts of buildings have different levels of CO2 (see attached image as an example) and some of the longer recordings show how ventilation systems turning on and off affect the CO2 levels.
To do an indoorco2map recording, you have to be physically located in the building you are measuring (you can’t manually submit them later), again this is a bit of a drag, but it does mean that its much harder to fraudulently submit recordings. The app does make doing the recordings very easy and once you’ve tried it a couple of times, it becomes second nature to start one when you go into a shop and then submit as you leave.
Indoorco2map doesn’t collect any user data (except location and CO2 readings), there isn’t even a sign in feature. I like this a lot because it means submissions can’t be traced back to me.
Lastly, indoorco2map has a button that allows downloading the data very easy. There’s also an R package for analyzing it.
So if I had to pick my favourite, I’d say that Airspot is visually the best one at the moment, but indoorco2map wins in data reliability and ease of data collection.
But ultimately, I don’t think this has to be a competition, as long as people are contributing to a global dataset of CO2 recordings, I’m happy. And having platforms like the Airspot map, which integrate all of them, takes away the need to choose.
@JordanAirSpot are you planning on integrating the indoorco2map data too?
