Dashboard Configuration

A website application dashboard provides a means of near real-time building IAQ performance visualization and serve as a data download hub. Purple Air and AirThings Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) provide the necessary infrastructure to programmatically communicate with the sensors after deployment for device metadata alteration and IAQ measurement data retrieval. Through GitHub Actions a workflow may be scheduled to retrieve and preprocess newly measured data using the APIs and store the data in the repository database for the dashboard's use. Heroku cloud platform will serve as a means to make the dashboard accessible to authorized parties as it contains the infrastructure to sync with the source code and database in the dedicated GitHub repository. Using Google's Firebase authentication service, access to the dashboard will be restricted to users bearing UT Austin affiliated email domains to address data privacy concerns.

The dashboard itself will be developed using a combination of Plotly and Dash Python open-source libraries. Plotly provides tools for high resolution, interactive data plotting. Dash caters to enterprise and production level dashboard design in which Plotly generated figures can be embedded. The figures may be filtered by location or space type and can be displayed in various plot styles for detailed visualizations. Additionally, users will be allowed to select custom date ranges and measurement resolution to infer temporal trends in the data. Standardized thresholds from reputable sources like the United States EPA and American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) will provide context to the reported location measurements. The dashboard will also serve as a means for interested researchers to download raw data and submit requests for devices. We hope to work with the UT Sustainability office to integrate the dashboard into their website.