Measuring pollution at low cost

Public Lab is focused on democratizing the tools and techniques of environmental science so that communities who face pollution and other environmental problems can actually use them.

We believe that low cost, open source, easy to use hardware and software can enable anyone to collect data with which to hold polluters accountable.

Sensor data and open hardware development

Public Lab software projects focus on two areas: community collaboration and open hardware development (PublicLab.org), and data processing for our sensors and tools (MapKnitter.org and SpectralWorkbench.org, among others).

Our collaboration and development platform PublicLab.org enables thousands of people to publish updates and share designs for emerging environmental open hardware projects. Our browser-based data analysis tools make use of HTML5 features such as CSS 3d transforms for image distortion and the WebRTC webcam API for capturing spectral data, to make advanced features available to users in a powerful cross-platform, user-friendly, database-backed approach to open science tools.