So who is the "one of the largest air quality monitoring manufacturer in the world" they are referring to but not by name?
Awair seems to be the best-known consumer brand (?). I use an Awair Element which works great and has no subscription fee for the associated app or local API functionality, so it doesn't seem like it could be them?
They may be referring to the changes to PurpleAir API [0] that introduces paid requests that you can rip through quickly when doing large scale analysis.
In the United States, AirNow.gov includes most PurpleAir sensors, although they are annotated differently than “higher quality” sensors (I was going to say than government sensors, but here in Connecticut, the state has a number of PurpleAir monitors deployed and rapidly deployed more when stuff got bad due to Canadian wildfires a few weeks ago).
Fortunately, for local users, you can hit your own sensor and grab the data however often you want. I even wrote a tool to help out and drop it into influxdb and post it to MQTT[1]. They still support local fetching of data. However, many default integrations from tools like Home Assistant could be affected as they use the cloud integration.
Wow, I hadn't seen PurpleAir's new pricing. I made https://aqi.today years ago when the API was free and now it seems like its API usage will cost over $100 per day. But they haven't even notified me about this yet. Strange.
I would have thought that purpleair was the best-known consumer brand. It looks like this May they introduced API pricing? But honestly, it still seems very reasonable
My biggest complaint with Awair is they only let you download the last month of data easily from the app. That said, they are hacker-friendly otherwise -- for example they offer a local API!
I have an IQAir monitor, but their whole system seems like a PurpleAir copycat. Right now, most of the data on their maps comes from PurpleAir sensors, and it's likely that it's PurpleAir that doesn't care for that.
That said, IQAir is kind of crazy to me. They launched a new dashboard which has a "view as TV dashboard" button, but doesn't let you click it unless you upgrade your plan. The local data access situation is also unclear to me; I bought the sensor after reading that it has a Samba server, but it requires the indoor monitor to display the password to you. I opened a support case to get the password for local analysis, but am beginning to feel like they're not going to give it to me. (Who wouldn't want an indoor air quality monitor? Well I already have one. I've cared about indoor air quality forever, but after wondering for two days why the sky was a weird shade of yellow, I wanted to keep an eye on outdoor air quality as well.)
In that case, it will be UART time. It's definitely Linux running an out-of-date unpatched Samba. Won't be at all difficult to get my data, I'm guessing. The question is... why do they think there's money in a cloud service that shows you dashboards of your own data? They should be bending over backwards to accommodate anyone that wants to contribute to their public site; they are way behind PurpleAir there.
TL;DR I'm certain that PurpleAir is the unnamed company in this article. IQAir is too new to be relevant in the space.
This comment saved me from just ordering a IQAir outdoor monitor. Great timing. I'd like an outdoor unit that supports PoE (which the IQAir monitor has) because I'm definitely not going around replacing batteries all the time, but that seems hard to come by, so I might have to give up my attempts at measuring air pollution from the side of my house.
Yeah. Send me an email if you want the outcome of my support ticket or attempts to hack the device.
Ignoring the software, the device itself is great. Two sensors compare their outputs to figure out if it's valid or not, and the case seems quite protective from the elements (and easily mounted to my weather station pole). I didn't need POE, I have AC out there, but overall it's a good way of supplying power to something like this.
Awair seems to be the best-known consumer brand (?). I use an Awair Element which works great and has no subscription fee for the associated app or local API functionality, so it doesn't seem like it could be them?