Overview
HalesAir is a seven-month STEM partnership project in which T Level Digital (Data Analytics) students at Halesowen College take ownership of the full data science pipeline — from hardware assembly through to community-facing presentations.
Funded by a Royal Society Partnership Grant to Halesowen College, the project runs January to July 2026. James Williams (Research Fellow, University of Nottingham) participates as STEM Partner, providing expert guidance in sensor technology, MicroPython programming, data science methodology, and science communication.
What Students Do
Students design, build, and program Raspberry Pi Pico W microcontrollers fitted with Waveshare BME680 environmental sensors. Each unit is deployed at a selected location around the college, capturing continuous readings of temperature, humidity, air pressure, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
Over the monitoring period students collect, clean, and analyse real longitudinal data, then build interactive visualisations and deliver evidence-based presentations to local stakeholders.
The Data Pipeline
The BME680 sensor communicates over I2C to the Pico W, which runs MicroPython to read, format, and transmit readings via Wi-Fi HTTP POST to a central server. Data is logged, cleaned, and visualised using Python — following the same workflow used in professional environmental monitoring research.
Community Impact
No hyper-local air quality monitoring currently exists for the Halesowen College site. Students’ findings will be the first systematic dataset capturing spatial variation in air quality across the college estate, with potential to inform facilities decisions and community awareness of environmental health.
