Atmospheric Monitoring with Arduino

Preface

There’s a story (it’s either an old vaudeville joke or a Zen koan) in which a fisherman asks a fish, “What’s the water like down there?” and the fish replies “What is water?” If the story is just a joke, the point is to make us laugh; but if it’s a koan, the point is that the most obvious and ubiquitous parts of our immediate environment are, paradoxically, often the easiest to overlook.

We as a species are probably a little bit smarter than fish: at least we know that we spend our lives “swimming” at the bottom of an ocean of air. About 4/5th of that ocean is the relatively harmless gas nitrogen. Around another 1/5 of it is the highly reactive and slightly toxic gas oxygen. The Earth’s atmosphere also contains trace amounts of other harmless ...