Instruments

IESH — Integrated Environmental Science Hub

A classroom kit that grows into a full environmental station. The first prototype is built and tested on the bench; a soldered rebuild and the circuit boards for the full station are under way.

Building Deployments: IESH-KMC-001 Programme: Weather and Air Across Altitude

Live data

Temperature (°C) — 24h

This station posts every 15 minutes · WHO PM2.5 24h guideline: 15 µg/m³

What it measures

Today (v0.1): air temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, soil temperature, soil moisture, CO and air-quality proxies (uncalibrated MQ sensors, logged raw), and sky/cloud imagery. Designed modules awaiting funding: true PM1.0/PM2.5/PM10 (PMS5003), CO₂ (SCD40), and weather with snow.

One instrument

From a classroom kit to a full station

IESH, the Integrated Environmental Science Hub, is HICS's environmental instrument, built so that one core serves a classroom and a research station. It starts as a kit students wire together on a desk and grows, on the same core, into a full outdoor station. On the costing, EDU is the classroom kit and SCI-AIR the full station; both use the same core. At every step it runs offline: it keeps its own records, and it serves its own lessons over its own Wi-Fi to whatever phones and laptops a school has.

The steps

Where each one stands

Classroom kit — built and tested on the bench. The first prototype, v0.1, is a Raspberry Pi with sensors for air temperature, humidity and pressure, soil temperature and moisture, and two gas sensors, wired by hand on a cardboard base. It ran its learning portal and was demonstrated at AIT Jury Day in June 2026. Testing it showed what had to change: the power supply was too weak, so sensors dropped out, and the software recorded a dead sensor's last value as if it were a reading. The software is fixed.
Modular core — under way. The same circuit is being rebuilt on a soldered perfboard, so it holds together and can be made the same way twice. Two custom circuit boards for the full-station design are drawn and ready to manufacture: a carrier board that sits on the Raspberry Pi and takes plug-in sensor modules, and a solar power board for schools without mains power.
Full station — planned. The core in a sealed outdoor enclosure, with a weather station that also monitors snow, an all-sky camera, and reference-grade air-quality sensors for particulates (PM2.5) and carbon dioxide.
School STEM lab — planned. The station becomes part of a school's science lab: the lessons use its own readings, and teachers are trained to run it.

→ The v0.1 build, in photographs · → Note: building the classroom prototype

The lessons

A classroom laboratory, offline

The kit carries five learning modules (climate, soil, air quality, data science and environment) with 27 activities aligned to Nepal's national curriculum, from Grade 6 up. Students connect to the kit's own Wi-Fi; no internet is needed. → HICS Learn

Current status

The first IESH hub, IESH-KMC-001, is planned for the HICS workshop in Lalitpur, and hubs follow along the transect from Nepalgunj to Dho Tarap. The v0.1 software is open source at github.com/hics-nepal.

→ View hardware designs on GitHub

Embed live data

Embed this station's live data on any website using the snippet below. The chart refreshes automatically every 60 seconds.

IESH-KMC-001 — Temperature

<iframe
  src="https://himalayansciences.org/embed/station/IESH-KMC-001/?param=temperature_c&theme=dark"
  width="480" height="220"
  style="border:none;border-radius:6px;"
  title="IESH-KMC-001 live temperature — HICS"
  loading="lazy"></iframe>

Available params: temperature_c, humidity_rh, pressure_hpa, pm2_5. Theme: dark or light.

Researcher

Pawan Dhakal

Founder and Director