KAIRair — Backyard Weather Network

The MVP of a community air network, built in public. Backyard-scale DIY and small-batch weather stations that you own, that update themselves over signed OTA, and that turn live readings into something you can feel. Weather is our way into the experience of air — and air is full of life. An Atomic 47 Labs project, from Kelowna, BC.

kairair

David Olsson

The Air We Live In: What a Backyard Network Is Actually For
A longform case for KAIRair: a backyard weather-and-air network built on one source of truth, signed updates, owned data, and an experience you can feel — and the ladder that runs from a single location all the way up to AI and us. Where it is, what it does, and the road to launching the MVP.
2026-07-13#kairair#manifesto#air-quality#iot#roadmap#building-in-public#mvp#civic-data
More Than Weather
The finale. KAIRair looks like a weather network, and for now it is one. But weather was always the way in, not the destination. Air carries pollen, smoke, particulates, sound — the invisible traffic of a living place. This is what a network built to make air visible is actually for.
2026-07-13#kairair#vision#air-quality#building-in-public#manifesto#future
Calibration Mode: The First Ten
An honest status report on where KAIRair actually is: ten stations, four types, sitting together on a bench getting checked against each other before any of them earns a spot in a stranger's yard. What calibration mode is, why it's the gate, and the state-of-the-network table with the red cells left in.
2026-07-13#kairair#calibration#building-in-public#mvp#honest-status#hardware
Weather You Can Feel
A chart tells you it's 4°C and humid. It doesn't make you feel the grey. KAIRair gives every station a full-screen, installable scene — a live 3D sky driven by its real readings and the real position of the sun — so the air becomes something you experience, not just read.
2026-07-13#kairair#experience#threejs#pwa#design#building-in-public
Your Air Is a Service
A weather network that only shows you a map is a dead end. KAIRair's data is meant to be built on — through a key-authenticated research API, a live message stream, and an MCP server that lets an AI assistant query the network in plain language.
2026-07-13#kairair#api#mcp#developers#open-data#building-in-public
What a Host Does, What a Host Gets
The whole network comes down to one person plugging in one station. Here's exactly what hosting asks of you — whether you get a finished kit or build your own — and exactly what you get back for putting a sensor in your yard.
2026-07-13#kairair#hosts#onboarding#diy#building-in-public#hardware
Claimed, and Private by Default
A weather station lives in someone's yard, and its data quietly says where they are and when they're home. So on KAIRair, every station belongs to a person, not the platform — and privacy is a default we keep deepening, not a setting you have to go find.
2026-07-13#kairair#privacy#ownership#building-in-public#design#trust
Sun, Battery, USB
A weather station's hardest problem isn't measuring the weather. It's staying alive to measure it tomorrow. Three ways to keep a station powered — USB, battery, solar — and why the first batch of ten is stuck in calibration before it earns the right to sit in a stranger's backyard.
2026-07-13#kairair#hardware#power#calibration#building-in-public#esp8266
Updating a Fleet You Can't Reach
Once a station is in someone's backyard, you can't walk over with a USB cable. It has to update itself — which means it has to trust an update arriving over the internet. Here's how KAIRair does that safely, and the day we had to rotate a key we couldn't afford to lose.
2026-07-13#kairair#ota#security#firmware#building-in-public#cryptography
Many Boards, Many Sensors, One Network
Most weather platforms make you pick from a fixed list of measurements. KAIRair does the opposite: plug in a sensor it has never heard of, and the network captures its readings the moment the firmware reports them — no schema change, no migration, no permission.
2026-07-13#kairair#sensors#data-model#building-in-public#architecture#extensibility
One Source of Truth
A pin number lives in the firmware, the wiring diagram, the docs, and the parts list. When they disagree, which one is right? KAIRair's answer: none of them should be authored. They're all generated from one folder of YAML.
2026-07-13#kairair#kairair-state#code-generation#building-in-public#architecture#yaml
From Four Sketches to One Firmware
Four boards meant four copies of the same firmware — and a bug you fixed once but shipped three more times. The story of collapsing them into one shared-HAL firmware, and why the duplication was the real defect.
2026-07-13#kairair#firmware#esp8266#building-in-public#refactor#architecture
Air, Out Loud
KAIRair started as a drawer of little boards that measured the air and told no one. This is the story of turning a pile of scripts into an MVP: a backyard weather network you can actually see.
2026-07-13#kairair#building-in-public#weather-network#esp8266#mvp#origin