Google has teamed up with the O’Reilly Data Sensing Lab to deploy hundreds of Arduino-based environmental sensors at its upcoming annual I/O conference.

Using software built with the Google Cloud Platform, Mountain View will be collecting and visualizing ambient data about the conference, including temperature, humidity and air quality – all in real time. Altogether, the sensors network are slated to provide approximately 4,000 continuous data streams over a ZigBee mesh network managed by Device Cloud by Etherios.

In addition, the Arduino-powered sensors will be capable of detecting fluctuations in noise level, with some attached to footstep counters in an attempt to analyze and understand collective movement around the conference floor.

“As a key goal of Google I/O is to promote innovation in the open, the project’s Cloud Platform code, the Arduino hardware designs, and even the data collected, will be open source and available online after the conference,” explained Michael Manoochehri, Google Developer Programs Engineer.

“Networked sensor technology is in the early stages of revolutionizing business logistics, city planning, and consumer products. We are looking forward to sharing the Data Sensing Lab with Google I/O attendees, because we want to show how using open hardware together with the Google Cloud Platform can make this technology accessible to anyone.”

With the help of the Maps DevRel team, Google will also be displaying visualizations of trending data on several screens around the conference. Meanwhile, members of the Mountain View’s Data Sensing Lab are scheduled to be on hand in the Google I/O Cloud Sandbox to show off prototypes and talk to attendees about open hardware development.

As previously discussed on Bits & Pieces, Atmel microprocessors are the chips of choice for the Arduino platform, both in their AVR flavor and ARM varieties. Arduino has democratized hardware in a way that allows anyone – young or old, engineer or not, rich or poor – to create anything they can imagine.

As Arduino’s founder, Massimo Banzi puts it, “You don’t need anyone’s permission to create something great.”