At Wooga, we're very conscious about our work environment and the happiness of everyone working here. So when some Woogas moved to 3rd floor in winter and began to feel tired and complain of headaches, we knew something was not right.
After a bit of research, we came up with the idea that perhaps the air could a little to sticky. So we decided to start measuring the CO2 levels.
We started with one sensor to evaluate the technology what kind of readings we were getting. To our surprise, our 3rd Floor was getting extreme high readings, especially on windy days when no one would open windows.
Basic hardware we used was a Raspberry PI 2 Model B and a TFA-Dostmann AirControl Mini CO2 measuring device, plus microSD and power supply. For the reading of the data, we use a python script plus some help from the henryk ploetz to read the values from the Co2 device.
By default, the script sends the readings to Librato for easy viewing. We created a dashboard showing all our readings. At the moment we have six sensors distributed across our three floors, but we're going to expand this in the coming weeks.
In addition, we created a Slack slash command to display current values in Slack. Since Librato allows for retrieval of values, Librato is also acting as a our data store - no need for an extra data store service.
Our slack command uses SlackRato as a backend. It's very simple Sinatra application that can easily be hosted at Heroku. It only supports our /co2 command at the moment, but will do more in the future.
As an extra bonus, Librato supports alerts for metrics and also has Slack integration. One and one make two, now our Slack weather channel is sent an alert when the office conditions become uncomfortable.
We are looking into resin.io to automate the deployment to the RaspberryPis, this would make having more sensors crazy easy. A further sensor we are looking to integrate is humidity, but we are still searching for an optimal sensor.