An open-source data acquisition system for laboratory and industrial scale applications

Portability, ease of use, robustness, and system cost are important parameters in designing flexible measurement systems. To this end, we introduce a cost-efficient and open-source measurement system based on consumer hardware for measuring air properties such as temperature, humidity, particle concentration in order to determine indoor air quality, thermal comfort, or air pollution. Cost and energy efficient sensor modules are integrated into an USB-based measurement interface that supports a wide range of communication protocols including Serial Peripheral Interface, Inter Integrated Circuit, Recommended Standard 232 and Recommended Standard 485. Moreover, the system provides a web interface and an application programming-interface that enables real time access to sensor data. In this paper we present the design of the hardware set-up, an overview of the sensors supported so far, and the software architecture as well as application examples.