Environmental sensor included in the Cisco Catalyst 9136/9166 Access Point.

Regardless of the different points of view on the COVID pandemic, the need for better ventilation and good quality air has become a key topic of conversation in companies. In today’s article, we want to introduce you to the CISCO WiFi-6e access point family that incorporates sensors that allow you to monitor the air, to measure the quality of the ambient air. Environmental sensor included in Access Point Cisco Catalyst 9136/9166. This feature is available on Cisco Catalyst 9166 Series Access Points and Cisco Catalyst 9136 Series Access Points. The AP sensor reports on temperature, humidity, total volatile organic compounds, and provides a calculated indoor air quality index.

What does the environmental sensor included in the Cisco Catalyst 9136/9166 Access Point record and track?

The ability to record and track various aspects of air quality in your buildings. The ambient air quality sensors in the 9136 / 9166 provide the ability to monitor various aspects related to air quality, including:

• Calculated air quality (“IAQ”) metric
• Temperature (degrees C)
• Humidity (%)
• ECO2 (estimated CO2 – calculated based on TVOC)
• ETOH (estimated ethanol)
• Total Volatile Volatile Compounds (“TVOC”, PPB)
• And thirteen different RMOX values

Technology overview

The key components in the implementation of this functionality are:

• Cisco Catalyst 9800 WLC with code 17.8 or newer (currently in Beta)
• Cisco Catalyst 9136 / 9166 WiFi-6e Access Point with integrated ambient air quality sensor
• One TIG stack (Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana)
• Access point sensors are only enabled since IOS-XE v17.8, so this is our minimum starting point in terms of software.

We will use the WLC 9800 to configure the WiFi access point to send its sensor data to our TIG stack, and the TIG stack will store our data over time and allow us to produce some graphs, charts, etc. You can disable, enable, and configure the scan interval of the sensors from the CLIs of the Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controller.

The TIG stack:

“TIG” is a term for three products commonly used together to provide dashboard type services; Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana. This is how we will consume the data generated by the access points.

• Telegraf is a small and popular piece of software that we use to receive our streaming data and sends that data to the database, InfluxDB.
• InfluxDB is a popular time series database. A time series database is one that marks everything with a timestamp and allows you to run time-based queries on the data it contains.
• Grafana is a popular dashboard software that allows you to query a time series database and draw various graphs and charts based on the returned data.