Air pollution poses a severe threat to humans and the natural environment. High levels of air pollution are linked to respiratory problems, mental illness, skin diseases etc. Monitoring air pollution to report, study and take appropriate actions to curb it is an important agenda on many civic and government institutions. This work aims to develop a capable system to cover these grounds. The system is cost effective, portable, and accurate for providing warnings in case life threatening levels of pollutants is discovered. These specifications were responsible in the selection of ATmega32 processor with Arduino UNO development board for the main air pollution monitoring unit. It is a low power controller and can be powered by solar panels. The sensors are capable of detecting CO, CO2 , Methane, dust of PM 1.0, PM 10.0 and temperature and humidity are passed through a conditioning circuit and are then interfaced to the main control unit. The signals are calibrated initially to reduce erroneous detections. Short messaging service or SMS is used to wirelessly transmit data to a base station which is capable of alerting in case of a hazard. Wireless networks eliminate many limitations posed by wired networks, mainly costs related to wiring infrastructure.
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