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I also own an indoor AirGradient, and I like supporting open-source, open hardware, but I've been pretty disappointed with the product. There were no instructi
by mtlynch 2y ago
I also own an indoor AirGradient, and I like supporting open-source, open hardware, but I've been pretty disappointed with the product.
There were no instructions in the box, and I had to dig around a while until I found this PDF from three years ago.[0] I normally can figure out a gadget without reading instructions, but this wasn't self-explanatory, as there are no inputs on the device itself, and I had to figure out how to connect it to my WiFi.
It's open-source, but there are no official instructions for re-flashing the device. I had to piece the process together from third-party blog posts.
The code itself is pretty low quality. They use tons of globals that could trivially be local variables, and they throw away precision of floats by casting them to ints.
I fixed a bunch of bugs in my fork[1] and started contributing them upstream, and the maintainer told me that they just did a giant rewrite, so I'd have to re-do all my changes.[2] I get that it happens, but I would have preferred they announce in the README that the code is deprecated and not to work on it until this rewrite is complete.
I still think it's fine overall and I'd probably buy it again for other rooms in my house, but I hope they get their act together a bit more.
[0] https://www.airgradient.com/documents/AirGradient%20Manual%2012APR2021.pdf https://www.airgradient.com/documents/AirGradient%20Manual%2...
[1] https://github.com/mtlynch/airgradient-arduino https://github.com/mtlynch/airgradient-arduino
[2] https://github.com/airgradienthq/arduino/pull/45 https://github.com/airgradienthq/arduino/pull/45
- ahaucnx 2y agoAchim from AirGradient here. I fully understand your frustration. Maybe a bit of background information to put this into perspective. Until around a year ago, the open-source DIY kits where a seperate 'side project' as we focused on our (now retired) closed source air quality monitors. However last year we decided to go fully open-source hardware and started to merge the closed source features into the open-source firmware. Because we needed a much better code base, a complete re-write was required (also supporting two different MCUs). So the last 6 months was really a transition period and things were a bit messy but I believe we have a much better onboarding and instructions [1] now available on the website and are continuing to work on it. [1] https://www.airgradient.com/documentation/ https://www.airgradient.com/documentation/
- mtlynch 2y agoHi Achim, thanks for the response! Would it be possible for you to document somewhere how to flash from source? The website currently kind of explains it under "Flashing Of The AirGradient Firmware," but step two is to flash the "ONE_V9.ino" file, but there's no explanation of where to get that file. I know it used to exist on AirGradient's Github[0], but now I don't see it anywhere after the v3 rewrite. [0] https://github.com/airgradienthq/arduino/blob/2.4.15/examples/ONE_V9/ONE_V9.ino https://github.com/airgradienthq/arduino/blob/2.4.15/example...
- ahaucnx 2y agoIt's now called "OneOpenAir.ino". We are still in the process to update the help files.