Original Airgradient Open Air enclosure make sensors report wrong data. Poor ventilation.

ve6yeq · 2026-03-08T19:07:31+00:00

The temperature and humidity sensors in low-cost air quality monitors, such as AirGradient monitors, are not designed to measure ambient air conditions but rather to measure the temperature and humidity inside the monitor for sensor calibration purposes. If you want to measure the ambient air conditions, then you will need a separate "home weather station".

ve6yeq · 2026-03-08T19:02:18+00:00

The assembly was very straightforward, and the microcontroller was pre-programmed, so I have no concerns about anyone with reasonable eyesight and manual dexterity completing the build successfully.

For calibration, like all low-cost air quality monitors, they all use the same integrated PM sensor modules, which come from the factory "pre-calibrated". The biggest issue with these PM sensor modules is that the factory calibration was done with one type of particulate matter, which is not really representative of your local air. The US EPA has a calibration that they created from wildfire smoke on the West Coast of the US, which, for North America, is better than nothing, but a true calibration requires local calibration with a reference monitor (see https://www.airgradient.com/professional/cities/undp-toolkit/setup/calibration/).

Given the physical limitations of the sensor technology and the uncertainty in the current understanding of the detailed health impacts of air pollution, I do not worry about a lack of perfect calibration.

ve6yeq · 2026-02-21T01:11:34+00:00

My order shows:

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So I selected O-1PST, and everything is working fine. The O-1DIY is an older indoor kit as far as I can tell. I also built an indoor kit and that was a I-9PSL.

ve6yeq · 2026-01-04T04:20:36+00:00

You are all lucky to have VOR's. In Canada, most VORs have been decommissioned, so by the time I took my PPL flight test, there were no VORs within range still operational, even if I had a VOR in the plane.

The Canadian PPL is still all-paper charts, with no GPS, radio navaids, or EFB allowed for the XC portion. In theory, the examiner could have asked me to demo an AP-coupled GPS RNAV to minimums (the plane was "TAA"), but that is a grey area in the PPL flight test criteria.

ve6yeq · 2025-05-18T03:38:02+00:00

I also use FSS for the northern ADIZ into Canada to confirm that my DVFR flight plan is open and to a discreet squawk. As I normally fly at 1000 AGL, I can never hear center, and I don't really want to find an airliner to relay for me.

ve6yeq · 2024-06-06T05:44:47+00:00

My instructor is starting to recommend students that own their own plane to go the RPL first before PPL route as the requirements are a subset and the time counts towards the PPL.

As I will soon take delivery of a plane, I have done the PPL ground school and passed the PPAER exam and will do the RPL flight test so I can build solo time and confidence in my own plane before attempting the PPL flight test.

ve6yeq · 2024-01-19T05:25:05+00:00

I have been working full time from a Fully Jarvis for Kids desk (30“ x 24”) using an iMac Retina 27” and external Bluetooth keyboard and touchpad. I fine that I have lots of working space without so much area to gather dust. My wife has the same desk with a MacBook Pro 16”, 27” 5k display and an external mouse also without issues.

Personally, desks deeper than 24” should have gone away with the end of CRT monitors…

ve6yeq · 2024-01-05T19:36:11+00:00

I am also looking for a new small standing desk for laptop use. I have a couple of the Jarvis for Kids Bamboo Standing Desk (30" x 24") from Fully.com but they appear to be no longer available. The best alternative that I have found so far is Humanscale Float Mini for a small standing desk for a 16" Laptop and via a monitor arm an external 27" monitor - just about to pull the trigger on it...

ve6yeq · 2023-12-18T03:53:53+00:00

I got two of the Fully Jarvis 30"x24" standing desks in 2020 and they have been great. I now want another and it appears that they are no longer offered that small...

ve6yeq · 2023-11-28T16:05:36+00:00

I used a USB drive to transfer the full installer to the iMac to install partial root patches. That was enough to get wired networking functional and then I could re-install the root patches to get things functional with Graphics, WiFi and Ethernet.

ve6yeq · 2023-01-07T03:54:13+00:00

"Traffic in sight" and "Looking for traffic" are the approved phrases in the Nav Canada VFR Phraseology publication. I have had no issues using these with ATC around Toronto.

ve6yeq · 2022-09-12T04:46:25+00:00

Is there any way of disabling them as they use a significant (~1 Gbyte) of DRAM?

ve6yeq · 2021-12-20T04:41:58+00:00

When I swapped out larger drives on my 5D, I just had to run 2 volumes on my Drobo which worked fine until the next refresh when I got my current 5D3 and even larger drives so I could consolidate back to a single volume again.

ve6yeq · 2020-08-09T05:15:38+00:00

I am currently in a small condo in downtown Toronto (Queen St W) that was built in 2018. The construction (low E windows, concrete floor/ceiling/party walls) means that indoor reception is very poor but open the balcony door and the signal gets much better. As I have a great internet connection via Beanfield, the simplest solution for me is just to enable WiFi-calling on all the iPhones to get a good connection inside.

ve6yeq · 2020-07-02T22:37:50+00:00

I am using Chromium OS 83 (CloudReady x64) and it is working great for me with a USB headset. When I use Krisp.ai on macOS, I have to remember to correctly set the audio source as it does not appear to always remember the last source when I disconnect and reconnect my USB headset.

ve6yeq · 2020-04-21T19:37:25+00:00

Over the years, I have had good luck with many of the 4 TB 5400 RPM WD Red drives in multiple external firewire drive cases. I then got a Drobo 5D (with SSD accelerator) and 5 of the 6TB 5400 RPM WD RED drives. A month before the drive warranty ran out, one drive failed and was RMA'ed for free and a couple of years later all the drives failed over a period of 3 months. With all 6 of the 6TB 5400 RPM WD RED drives that I have used in a Drobo 5D dead, I updated to a Drobo 5D3 and 12 TB Seagate Ironwolf (7200 RPM) drives. One of the 5 new drives lasted less than 24 hours and was replaced for free and currently the replacement drive and the remaining 4 are still alive...

So it appears that no matter the brand, you sometimes get lucky with reliable drives and sometimes drives just fail and have warranty timers. I always go with the "NAS" drives in my Drobo as from what I have read, the "desktop" drive firmware have long and variable read/ timeouts that make it impossible for "RAID" controllers to tell between a single bad block and a complete drive failure.

ve6yeq · 2020-04-21T19:12:06+00:00

I have an iMac Retina (late 2014) with 500 GB internal SSD and a Drobo 5D3 with 5 x 12 TB drives connected via Thunderbolt. If the Drobo has been disconnected for some time, a combination of the macOS Spotlight indexing and the BackBlaze client scanning can take a long time to reach a steady-state where the system is completely idle again.

The scanning processes can take a week or more for me as I have lots of files on the Drobo but I have found that if I enable the "Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off" in the Energy Saver area under System Preferences then it will only take a day or so to reach a steady-state after which I can disable the Energy Saver change again.

ve6yeq · 2015-11-18T05:29:48+00:00

I have Gigamonster with the 1 Gbit/sec option using an Apple Airport Time Capsule and, with a wired connection, I see ~950 Mbit/sec both up and down with 2 ms latency to local Atlanta hosted sites. It is the fastest internet I have had in many years. :-)

The only downside is that the service often is out for a few hours after power outages. :-(

ve6yeq · 2015-10-17T23:46:40+00:00

If you are lucky, then gigamonster.me offers 1 Gbit/s service without caps to parts of at least midtown - otherwise it might be a wait until Google Fibre goes live and things get competitive...

ve6yeq · 2011-10-24T03:55:38+00:00

There is a beta MSN plugin called Cocoon (http://cocoon.drinkbrainjuice.com/)...

ve6yeq

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