What's in your workshop?

We'd like to see where you make things

Author

Dale Dougherty
February 07, 2025

Go-Go Gloves V1 from Wearable Electronics

Table of Contents

Show us Your Workshop

Do you have a home workshop that you’re proud of? Big or small, we’d like to take a look at it and then share it with others. Over the years, we’ve featured two-page spreads of workshops such as the one below - this photo of Craig Crutchfield’s workshop that we published in 2010.

Craig Crutchfield’s workshop

It doesn’t have to be a man thing. It’s your thing, whoever you are. It’s a place you built to do the work that you love.

To share your workshop with Make: readers, take a good, well-lit photo of it and submit your workshop and a short description of it. Link for workshop submission.

Detecting Airborne Toxins

I was listening to a recent Sam Harris podcast about the LA Fires.  He mentioned that the air remains toxic and that conventional air monitors don’t pick up metals and other compounds in the air, especially when wind is kicking up dust in the devastated areas and blowing it to other areas.  Unlike a wildfire that burns trees and brush, urban fires like those in Pacific Palisades and Altadena in LA burned homes and all the plastic and other materials inside of them. Harris said that sensors in the Purple Air network report that the air is healthy but he knows it is not. He wondered if there was a device that could measure this toxic air. I wondered if there was a DIY device.

We have a Swiss-developed product called Oxocard Innovation Kit that has an available air cartridge that uses a Sensirion sensor.  I asked Thomas Garaio, the developer, and he said: “The three sensors can measure various pollutants in the air, including VOCs and nitrogen compounds such as those produced by combustion (NOx compounds). What they cannot detect are particles, such as dust and soot. These require different sensors. The VOCs are volatile carbon compounds, so I don't think they stay in the air very long."

Testing the Oxocard AirCartridge

Above, Rob Bullington in our office tested the Oxocard Air Cartridge by setting it near an air fryer. It proved only that it was easy to set up Oxocard up and have it begin reading data.

I wrote to Tim Dye who runs his own air monitoring business (TDEnviro.com) and he’s written for Make about comparing DIY air sensors to commercial versions. I asked him if it was possible for a DIY device to detect toxins in the air after a fire. He replied:

Measuring the toxins requires more sophisticated and expensive equipment/laboratory analysis to do in real-time.  Another method requires laboratory analysis. The best way to measure air toxics after a fire is mainly in the dust. So one method is to collect the dust on tape or another method (e.g., petri dish) and send that to a laboratory to analyze the compounds in the dust.

It's a challenging problem to solve in a low-cost way. 

We are starting a project in the Bay Area's refinery corridor to collect samples on Petri dishes and send them to labs to see what's falling onto the ground (and us). This is a low-cost collection, but the lab analysis costs $500-700 per sample. It should be an interesting project, but it's just getting started. 

Purple Air has started using low-cost VOC sensors in some of its devices, but honestly, these low-cost sensors produce uncertain and confusing data. 

It's so difficult during fires and after fires because people want quick and definitive answers, which are just not achievable now.

Several R&D efforts are underway for specific, lower-cost, speciated VOC instruments ($5-15K) that could be used, but we are years away from that. In 5+ years, we will have more of these instruments available.  

If you want to see a project that’s ideal for Oxocard, check out this article from our new issue. Build a Better Screen Lock: Smartphone Safe by Thomas Garaio.

Wearable Electronics book chat

Kate Hartman will join me on February 13th at 7pm ET / 4pm PT to talk about the Second Edition of Wearable Electronics. Kate is the founding director of Social Body Lab, a creative technology research group based out of OCAD University in Toronto, where she also serves as an associate professor. The new edition of her book, which teaches everything from choosing the right materials for a wearable-electronics project to explaining how components can be combined to create dynamic costumes and couture.

We will be joined by Hilary Predko and Mufaro Mukoki.

  • Hillary is a long-time collaborator. She is the Outreach Coordinator for the Second Edition, coordinating the end-of-chapter galleries, and also has several of her projects featured in the book. 

  • Mufaro is a Research Assistant on the Second Edition. She comes from a background as a fashion designer and recently completed her Master's thesis on using wearable technology to physicalize data. 

We will see some demos that bring some of the projects in the book to life.

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If you have ideas, projects or news items about the maker community, email me - [email protected].