The Development of an IoT-based Indoor Air Monitoring System Towards Smart Energy Efficient Classroom

Abstract

Indoor air quality has become a crucial issue, specifically during COVID 19 pandemic. The good indoor air quality will lead to occupants’ comfort condition, thus affecting their productivity. Indoor air temperature and relative humidity are two essential components of thermal comfort. This paper presents the development of a temperature and relative humidity monitoring system for the classroom using the Internet of Things (IoT). This system consists of three main components: logger nodes, a gateway logger, and an interconnected cloud server. The logger node (ESP8266 / ESP32 microcontroller and DHT22 sensor) is a device at the edge of the IoT system and is placed at the monitoring location. The logger gateway is built on a Raspberry Pi 4, which serves as an intermediate server. It receives periodic data (temperature and humidity) from the logger nodes through the publish-subscribe MQTT protocol and sends it to the MongoDB Atlas cloud database. The logger gateway saves all received logs into the SQLite database as temporary local storage and then uploads the data to the MongoDB Atlas cloud at a predefined interval. The MongoDB data is then displayed on a monitoring dashboard using MongoDB charts. The logger node with the DHT22 sensor has been adjusted using a linear model and successfully tested to monitor indoor and outdoor air conditions with satisfactory results. The recorded data has also been successfully modeled using the Gaussian Mixture Model and a simple Fuzzy model. These models can capture the dynamic of air condition in the room and predict the state of the cooling system.