Canary is a pocketable environmental monitor with an e‑paper display. Seven sensors, a full day of history on screen, and nothing to subscribe to.
None of it is visible, and a single number would not settle much anyway: 812 ppm is neither good nor bad until you know whether it is climbing or falling. So Canary keeps the last 24 hours of every measurement on screen. Here is what each one is, and why it is worth watching.
You breathe it out, and behind a shut door it has nowhere to go. Outdoor air sits near 420 ppm; a closed bedroom or a full meeting room passes 1,000 ppm easily, which is roughly where people start reporting stuffiness and poor concentration. There is nothing to smell. Canary shows the climb, and how fast an open door undoes it.
Particles smaller than 2.5Â micrometres reach deep into the lungs: wildfire smoke, pollen, road dust. The World Health Organization’s guideline is 15 µg/m³, and frying a steak can take a kitchen past it. What matters is the recovery: a spike that clears in twenty minutes means your extractor works; three hours means it does not.
Below about 30% and skin, sinuses and wooden instruments all start to complain. Above 60% and you are inviting mould and dust mites. Canary shows which way your rooms drift over a day, and how far.
One number for a whole home hides a lot: a nursery on an outside wall, a top‑floor bedroom in August. Sleep researchers tend to point at 16 to 19 °C (61 to 66 °F) for a bedroom, cooler than most people keep them. Canary reads the room it is actually in, and keeps the overnight curve.
Barometric pressure falls ahead of a weather front, often a day before the rain arrives. Plenty of people with migraines or aching joints say they can tell; what they have never been able to do is check. Canary keeps the curve, so a suspicion becomes something you can point at.
UV‑B is the narrow band, 240 to 320 nm, that burns skin and drives vitamin D. It has little to do with how bright a day looks: a cool overcast afternoon can carry most of the ultraviolet of a clear one, and a sunny window blocks nearly all of it. Canary reads that band itself.
Most air quality gadgets give you one number and a coloured ring. Canary gives you the shape of your whole day.
No glare, no backlight glow at 3am, no notification badge. The screen holds its last reading even between refreshes, and it stays legible in direct sunlight.
Every sensor plots its own history, so you see the spike and what caused it, not just the number right now.
Years of readings written locally. Pull the card, open the file. Nothing is held hostage behind an account.
Canary works fully offline. If you want remote dashboards and alerts, host the server yourself or use our free cloud option.
Build your own screen layouts, choose which readings sit where, and set the units for each reading independently: temperature in °C or °F, pressure in hPa, kPa, inHg or mmHg, particles by mass or count.
Sensor modules sourced from Switzerland, Germany and Korea. Each one draws its own 24‑hour trace on the e‑paper screen. Why these measurements matter.
A dual‑laser sensor sorts what it finds into size bands, PM1.0 through PM2.5 to PM10. Those bands are the greys in the trace, so the screen shows not just how much is in the air but how big it is. That is what separates kitchen grease from road dust from smoke drifting in off a fire.
A Swiss laser‑based CO2 sensor, accurate enough that you can see how many people walked in. On this trace the line climbs all night behind a closed door and falls off a cliff the moment it opens.
Readings do not have to fill the whole display. This one gives up part of the screen to a note pinned beside the curve, which is the sort of thing e‑paper is good for: it costs nothing to leave sitting there for a week.
Humidity is easy to get wrong, because electronics make their own heat and dry the air immediately around them. This sensor sits vented and set apart from the warm side of the board. The curve here runs from 43 to 61% across a single day.
Most barometers give you a number and a weather symbol. This one plots the whole day, so you see the slope rather than a snapshot, with an illustration that follows the trend and the reading in kilopascals, hectpascals or millibars.
A true UV‑B sensor, reading the 240–320 nm band directly rather than estimating it from visible light the way most consumer sensors do. Luminosity shares the screen, so you can tell if your office suspiciously illuminates in the dead of night while you're not there.
Take a photo in the app and it lands on your own Canary. Or on one you gave to somebody else, sitting on a shelf across the country. Everything is dithered down to one bit, which is the newsprint look e‑paper does better than any backlit screen in the house.
Nothing to unlock, nothing to swipe away. When you are not asking it anything, Canary is a quiet desk clock that happens to be logging every reading in the background.
The overnight hump nobody knew about.
It tells you when to switch the thing on.
Pocketable. Readable in full sun.
Tricorder mode, held up to the sky.
Silent. No fan, no chime, no glow.
A whole working day, at a glance.
Watching the pressure fall ahead of the snow.
Send a picture to a Canary across the country.
Find out what your respirator really filters.
Every part you can see here is a part you can replace. The battery, the e‑paper panel, the sensor module, the USB‑C board: all of it comes apart with ordinary tools and goes back together again.
We would rather sell you one Canary that lasts a decade than five that do not. Right to repair is a design constraint here: no glue where a screw would do, no pairing locks, no parts you have to ask our permission to buy.
Specifications
Seven sensor modules, one e‑paper screen, and a battery that charges over the same USB‑C cable as everything else you own.
Founders, operators and educators who put a Canary on their desk before we had a website to put it on.
We do a lot of in-person wellness workshops, and people notice it sitting on the table. It's a nice subtle way to show guests we're paying attention to the environment.
I was pretty skeptical at first. But after seeing the real-time data during wildfire season, we bought an air purifier for the main office.
Pack twenty people into a workshop room for four hours and the air gets heavy fast. The graph on screen makes it obvious when we need to pause for a stretch break and open the windows.
My lab gets pretty warm with all the hardware and server gear running constantly. Canary sits right next to my dev rig so I can track temperature spikes and it even showed me when a power supply was smoking.
Developing global hardware partnerships requires endless travel and long boardroom hours; Canary keeps my immediate breathing space healthy wherever I land.
Canary is a game-changer for executive health, keeping my air clean and my focus sharp during long investment strategy sessions at the office.
Canary for organizations
Offices, schools and facilities run Canary on its own mesh, on their WiFi, or through canary.earth with every site on one dashboard.
Units relay for each other across floors and outbuildings where WiFi does not reach.
Find the meeting room that never clears, the wing the air handler forgot, the hour your filters stop coping.
When wildfire smoke reaches the property line, every unit knows, and so does whoever decides about outdoor break.
The founding batch is small and hand-checked. Waitlist members get early-bird pricing and the first shipping slots.
Joining the waitlist does not charge you anything and does not commit you to buying.
Leave your email and we will tell you once: when the founding batch opens, with your early-bird price attached. That is the entire mailing list.
Fine particulate matter (PM2.5, and coarser and finer fractions), carbon dioxide, UV‑B, temperature, relative humidity and ambient pressure. Particulates are the tiny airborne particles produced by wildfire smoke, traffic, wood burning and cooking, and they are one of the most important indicators of air quality.
Yes, and each reading has its own setting, so you can mix them: temperature in °F alongside pressure in hPa, for instance. Temperature shows in °C or °F, pressure in hPa, kPa, inHg or mmHg, and particles either by mass (µg/m³) or as a particle count (#/cm³).
PM2.5 particles are roughly 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair. Because they are so small they can be inhaled deep into the lungs, and may affect everyone, especially children, older adults, and people with asthma or other respiratory conditions.
Yes. Wildfire smoke is largely made up of fine particulate matter, which is exactly what Canary is built to monitor. During wildfire season it helps you understand how much smoke is making its way indoors, so you can act when it does.
Most people spend around 90% of their time indoors, and outdoor air quality reports cannot tell you what is happening inside your home. Indoor air varies enormously with ventilation, filtration, cooking, candles, fireplaces, and whether smoke is getting into the building.
Yes, and it is one of the most common places people put one. There is no backlight and no sound by default, so it will not disturb a sleeping child while it tracks the room overnight.
No. Canary measures air quality; it does not filter it. Think of it as the information that tells you when to run the purifier, open a window, or change an HVAC filter. And, just as usefully, when you do not need to.
Canary uses high-quality sensor modules built for continuous monitoring. No consumer monitor is intended to replace laboratory equipment, and we will not claim otherwise. But Canary gives reliable, consistent measurements that let you track how your air changes over time, which is what actually drives decisions.
In the room where you spend the most time: a living room, bedroom or nursery. Avoid placing it right beside a window, a vent, the stove or a humidifier, since those will skew the readings locally rather than tell you about the room.
It will show it, and that is the point. Frying, grilling and high-heat cooking produce a lot of PM2.5. Most people are genuinely surprised to find that making dinner can briefly push indoor particle levels past what is outside during a pollution event.
Plenty of people wish to buy one because of smoke and then keep using it year-round. Indoor air shifts constantly with cooking, wood-burning stoves, seasonal allergens, renovations, and how tightly the house is shut against the weather.
No. Out of the box you place it somewhere and read the screen. The mesh networking, self-hosted server and custom screen layouts are there if you want them, and entirely ignorable if you do not.
We store your email address and use it once, to tell you the founding batch is open, with your early-bird price. No newsletter, no sharing with anyone else, and an unsubscribe link in the same email. Joining costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
