IESH — Integrated Environmental Science Hub
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), weather, muon, seismic.
A research station and a classroom laboratory in one box
The IESH is HICS's core platform: a modular, offline-first environmental station built on a Raspberry Pi. It logs air, soil, gas, and sky readings continuously to local storage, serves its own dashboard and learning portal over its own WiFi hotspot, and is designed for Nepal's reality — monsoon humidity, temperature extremes, intermittent power, and no internet at all. The current prototype, v0.1, is in field testing in Kathmandu.
How it was built: the v0.1 build-log gallery traces the prototype from a breadboard on 20 May 2026 to a boxed, working station on 15 June, with the field-testing notes alongside.
v0.1 — every sensor named, proxies labelled as proxies
Air — temperature, humidity, pressure ▸
A DHT22 reads air temperature and humidity; a BMP280 reads barometric pressure (which doubles as the atmospheric-depth reference used by the muon programme). The DHT22 reads about 2°C high at high humidity — a known sensor issue, logged transparently.
Soil — temperature and moisture ▸
A DS18B20 probe measures soil temperature; a capacitive sensor measures soil moisture, calibrated against recorded dry and saturated endpoints. These drive the agriculture activities in the learning portal.
Gas — CO and air-quality proxies (uncalibrated) ▸
MQ-7 (carbon monoxide) and MQ-135 (mixed gases) are inexpensive heated-coil sensors. They give a useful relative signal, not reference-grade concentrations — we log the raw values and label them as proxies. Reference-grade PM2.5 (PMS5003) and CO₂ (SCD40) modules are designed and await component funding.
Sky — fisheye camera ▸
A fisheye camera captures the sky every 15 minutes and estimates cloud cover — groundwork for the planned all-sky meteor camera.
The classroom mobile laboratory
The station carries its own learning portal: five modules — climate, soil, air quality, data science, environment — with 25+ activities aligned to Nepal's national curriculum, from Grade 6 to undergraduate. Visualisations are driven live by the station's own sensors. Everything works with zero internet: the IESH broadcasts its own WiFi hotspot and students connect from any phone or laptop. An onboard display cycles live readings for passers-by.
Provisioning, modularity, deployment
A complete station is provisioned from a blank SD card with one command; first boot installs everything unattended, and the data store survives re-flashes. The same core accepts swappable sensor modules — in design: true particulate and CO₂ modules, weather (UV, rain, wind), muon detection, and seismic sensing.
Local logging is solid — the station never loses data when the network drops, because it never depends on the network. Automatic sync of those local logs to this site's open-data API is the integration task now in progress; until it ships, the dashboard on this site shows demonstration data (see the notice on the data page).
v0.1 prototype in field testing at IESH-KMC-001, Kathmandu Metropolitan City. Sensors, offline logging, the onboard learning portal, and one-command provisioning are all working. Cloud sync is in final integration — local data is safe, cloud copy pending. All designs and software are open-source.
Build history — v0 (2026) ▸
The v0 prototype (Raspberry Pi 3B + DHT22 + BMP280 + MQ-135) was the proof-of-concept that validated offline-first logging and surfaced the DHT22 humidity bias. It ran at IESH-KMC-001 through early 2026 and directly shaped the modular v0.1. It is superseded; all new deployments use v0.1.
Embed this station's live data on any website using the snippet below. The chart refreshes automatically every 60 seconds.
Available params: temperature_c, humidity_rh, pressure_hpa, pm2_5. Theme: dark or light.
