Who Altruist Was Created For

Monitoring the environment involves plenty of pitfalls, making the job far harder than it looks at first glance. Our team—the creators of Altruist and the open-source project sensors.social—has spent seven years studying and working in this field, and we hope our experience will pleasantly surprise you and give you a practical tool for adapting to the conditions in which you and your loved ones live. Below we explain which main user groups Altruist is designed for…

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Where to get Altruist Indoor & Outdoor Sensor

Air monitor for indoors & outdoors: urban PM & noise, bedroom CO₂, indoor vs outdoor temp & humidity, barometric pressure, E-Ink display, Wi-Fi, USB-C, no forced cloud, Home Assistant ready. DIY & modding friendly! Super Early Bird – €149

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🏙️ You live in a big city or an ecologically challenged region

Think of it as a little adventure: getting to know your city better. The top-priority reason to buy a home air-quality station is to gain solid knowledge of what is happening indoors and outside throughout the year so you can adapt accordingly.

There’s always something to worry about, but it’s best not to let the extremes—“nothing is happening” vs. “everything is definitely bad”—take root. After seven years working with citizen air-quality monitoring around the world, we can assure you that personal, quantitative monitoring shows the real situation right where you live. After a year with Altruist you will see, in clear graphs with insights from the developers, how air quality varies by time of day, season, the operation of waste-incineration plants, industrial sites, power stations, seasonal fires, dust storms… and you’ll form an objective view of what is happening right outside your window—and adapt to it.

Altruist features for urban conditions

Street-grade particle sensor — tough enough to hang outside yet still fine indoors. If you mount Altruist Urban outside your window it won’t “choke” after the first sand truck rumbles past.
Outdoor noise measurement — Altruist is currently the only product in its class that adds a city-grade noise sensor, covering another important urban factor.

🤧🌿 You or your loved ones have allergies or bronchial asthma

Some of Altruist’s developers suffer from house-dust allergy; one of us spent childhood in hospital every few weeks with asthma attacks. Life is harder for such people, so it is especially important to help them control indoor air quality.

How Altruist helps allergy and asthma sufferers

Room profiling for particulate matter and humidity: in the first week you will get 24-hour snapshots with highlighted insights—graphs that let you compare rooms instead of staring at bare numbers.
Ventilation hints an Altruist on the balcony or even on a windowsill will warn you when outdoor air is bad so you can close the windows, turn on the purifier and postpone walks until traffic or a dust storm subsides.
Children’s rooms place a unit there to spot dust problems early and reduce the risk of developing dust allergy.

🛠️🏠 You are building a smart home

Most of our team are engineers who automate their homes. We provide an official integration in Home Assistant Store so you can add Altruist to your local smart-home setup in two clicks, plus ready-made automation blueprints that need no coding.

How Altruist is useful for a DIY smart-home engineer

RGB lamp indicator — link any parameter to a smart bulb so your room quietly signals changes (no need to turn the whole living-room red just because Grandpa lights his pipe on the balcony).
Air-purifier trigger — start a purifier inside whenever the outdoor unit detects smoke or dust.
Air-conditioner control — react automatically to rising outdoor humidity or temperature at dawn.

🕵️‍♂️📈 You like to support community initiatives independent of governments and corporations

Become a data source and join other Altruists to build a citizen network monitoring environmental issues in your region. The developers have open-sourced the entire sensors.social backend so local communities can launch an independent sensor map.

How Altruist helps independent monitoring

Trusted hardware — open-source and field-tested by thousands of users, easy to recommend to neighbours.
Your own map in one day — clone the GitHub repo, deploy on any domain and run a fully independent service that even the Altruist developers can’t interfere with.

The most fascinating lesson from seven years of experiments is the sheer diversity of motives, methods and analysis styles in environmental monitoring—from health concerns to activism, from outdated test tubes to high-end sampling stations, from smiley-faces to daily graphs. It all makes the task far more complex than it first appears, but we hope our team’s perspective embodied in Altruist and sensors.social will delight you and give you a useful tool for adapting to your environment.

Air Sensor Comparison Table

Model	Altruist Urban & Insight	PurpleAir Zen	AirGradient Indoor & Outdoor	Netatmo Weather Station	AirVisual Pro & Outdoor
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Price	Altruist Urban & Insight €189 ($221)	PurpleAir Zen €254 ($299)	AirGradient Indoor & Outdoor €328 ($385)	Netatmo Weather Station €152 ($179)	AirVisual Pro & Outdoor €638 ($748)
Type	Altruist Urban & Insight Dual-module, outdoor and indoor	PurpleAir Zen Can be outdoor or indoor	AirGradient Indoor & Outdoor Two separate modules	Netatmo Weather Station Dual-module, outdoor and indoor	AirVisual Pro & Outdoor Two separate modules
Particle Sensor	Altruist Urban & Insight Yes	PurpleAir Zen Yes	AirGradient Indoor & Outdoor Yes	Netatmo Weather Station No	AirVisual Pro & Outdoor Yes
Urban Noise Sensor	Altruist Urban & Insight Yes	PurpleAir Zen No	AirGradient Indoor & Outdoor No	Netatmo Weather Station Only indoor	AirVisual Pro & Outdoor No
Indoor CO2	Altruist Urban & Insight Yes	PurpleAir Zen No	AirGradient Indoor & Outdoor Yes	Netatmo Weather Station Yes	AirVisual Pro & Outdoor Yes
User Interface on Device	Altruist Urban & Insight LED indication on Urban + E-ink screen on Insight	PurpleAir Zen Only LED strip	AirGradient Indoor & Outdoor LED indication and small screen on Indoor	Netatmo Weather Station Only LED strip	AirVisual Pro & Outdoor LED indication on Outdoor and LCD screen on Pro
microSD Support	Altruist Urban & Insight Yes	PurpleAir Zen Yes	AirGradient Indoor & Outdoor No	Netatmo Weather Station No	AirVisual Pro & Outdoor No
Power Connector	Altruist Urban & Insight USB Type-C	PurpleAir Zen Micro USB	AirGradient Indoor & Outdoor USB Type-C	Netatmo Weather Station Micro USB	AirVisual Pro & Outdoor Micro USB on Pro & Ethernet PoE on Outdoor
Housing	Altruist Urban & Insight 3D printed, different colors and icons	PurpleAir Zen Only one color available	AirGradient Indoor & Outdoor Only one color available	Netatmo Weather Station Only one color available	AirVisual Pro & Outdoor Only one color available
Water Protection	Altruist Urban & Insight Fully sealed housing, air supply tube	PurpleAir Zen Unprotected open bottom of the sensor	AirGradient Indoor & Outdoor Fully sealed housing	Netatmo Weather Station Fully sealed housing	AirVisual Pro & Outdoor Fully sealed housing
UV Protection	Altruist Urban & Insight Protective shield made of ASA plastic	PurpleAir Zen Not specified	AirGradient Indoor & Outdoor Housing is made of ASA plastic	Netatmo Weather Station Not specified	AirVisual Pro & Outdoor Yes
Mandatory Cloud Connection	Altruist Urban & Insight No	PurpleAir Zen Yes	AirGradient Indoor & Outdoor No	Netatmo Weather Station Yes	AirVisual Pro & Outdoor Yes
Local Device Management via IP	Altruist Urban & Insight Full control over settings	PurpleAir Zen Most functions are not available, settings only via corporate cloud	AirGradient Indoor & Outdoor No, but available via Home Assistant	Netatmo Weather Station No, only in the app	AirVisual Pro & Outdoor No, only in the app
Online Air Quality Map by Community	Altruist Urban & Insight Yes, optional	PurpleAir Zen Yes, main entry point to view data	AirGradient Indoor & Outdoor Yes, optional	Netatmo Weather Station Yes, optional	AirVisual Pro & Outdoor Yes, optional
Home Assistant Integration	Altruist Urban & Insight Yes, only the HA addon is needed	PurpleAir Zen Yes, but limited API and cloud connection are required	AirGradient Indoor & Outdoor Yes, only the HA addon is needed	Netatmo Weather Station Yes, only the HA addon is needed	AirVisual Pro & Outdoor Yes, but only for Pro
Data Control and Ownership	Altruist Urban & Insight The user owns the data and controls its distribution	PurpleAir Zen The company owns the data, but users can view and export it with some limitations	AirGradient Indoor & Outdoor The user owns the data and controls its distribution	Netatmo Weather Station Officially owned by users, but they must consent to the company's use of their data	AirVisual Pro & Outdoor Officially owned by users, but they must consent to the company's use of their data
Open Source and Hardware	Altruist Urban & Insight Yes	PurpleAir Zen No	AirGradient Indoor & Outdoor Yes	Netatmo Weather Station No	AirVisual Pro & Outdoor No
Custom Firmware and DIY-mods	Altruist Urban & Insight Yes	PurpleAir Zen No	AirGradient Indoor & Outdoor Yes	Netatmo Weather Station No	AirVisual Pro & Outdoor No