Array of Things began as a failed workshop for high school students. Three years ago, Charlie Catlett, director of the Computation Institute’s Urban Center for Computation and Data and senior computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, and fellow researchers were helping students assemble simple air quality monitors with the intent to deploy them in downtown Chicago to teach about collecting data in a major city. (The Computation Institute is a joint initiative between the University of Chicago and Argonne.) ... And last month they received a $3.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation as part of the national Smart Cities Initiative.

With the grant they will deploy nodes all over the city on public poles. They’re gearing up to deploy the first 50 early next year, 150 by the end of next summer, and 200 by this time in 2016. At that point they will stop to evaluate, and make any necessary changes to the internal components or external enclosures before deploying another 300 by the summer of 2017. The final goal is 500 nodes.

Each node contains multiple sensors, and the combination of sensors varies depending on location and what researchers wish to study (sound intensity, light, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, vibration, air quality, etc.). And according to Catlett, that’s “not just generic air quality.” The sensors will specify gases like ozone and nitrogen dioxide and also specific concentrations that give clues to other factors in the environment like nitrous oxide from heavy trucks and particulate matter from combustion engines. “Generic only tells you good or bad, by sensing individual gases, we can get an idea of where each comes from,” says Catlett.

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The team foresees innumerable uses for the data that will be gathered. For example, it could inform the city’s implementation of traffic controls to improve air quality in certain neighborhoods, or response to problems like standing water and flooding (by providing rainfall measurements on a block-by-block basis). ... The extent of design consideration that went into building Array of Things sensor nodes and their enclosures is astounding. They must withstand Chicago winters and also accommodate a lot of sensing technology, all of which need different placements — facing up or down, exposed to or hidden from air. To develop a container dynamic enough, the designers and scientists worked together closely.