Description
Designed for environmental monitoring, Enviro+ lets you measure air quality (pollutant gases and particles*), temperature, pressure, humidity, light, and noise level.
Enviro+ is an affordable alternative to environmental monitoring stations that can cost tens of thousands of pounds and, best of all, it's small and hackable and lets you contribute your data to citizen science efforts to monitor air quality via projects like Luftdaten.
Features
- BME280 temperature, pressure, humidity sensor (datasheet)
- LTR-559 light and proximity sensor (datasheet)
- MICS6814 analog gas sensor (datasheet)
- ADS1015 analog to digital converter (ADC) (datasheet)
- MEMS microphone (datasheet)
- 0.96' colour LCD (160 × 80)
- pHAT-format board
- Fully-assembled
- Compatible with all 40-pin header Raspberry Pi models
- Pinout
- Python library
Citizen science air quality monitoring
This board was developed in collaboration with the University of Sheffield, with the aim of letting you contribute real-time air quality data from your local area to open data projects like Luftdaten.
Devices like Enviro+ allow fine-grained, detailed datasets that let us see shifts in air quality through time and across different areas of cities. The dataset gets better in quality every time an additional The more devices that contribute data, the better quality the dataset becomes.
Particulate matter (PM) is made up of tiny particles that are a mix of sizes and types, like dust, pollen, mould spores, smoke particles, organic particles and metal ions, and more. Particulates are much of what we think of as air pollution.
The analog gas sensor can be used to make qualitative measurements of changes in gas concentrations, so you can tell broadly if the three groups of gases are increasing or decreasing in abundance. Without laboratory conditions or calibration, you won't be able to say 'the concentration of carbon monoxide is n parts per million', for example.
Temperature, air pressure and humidity can all affect particulate levels (and the gas sensor readings) too, so the BME280 sensor on Enviro+ is really important to understanding the other data that Enviro+ outputs.
You can implement Enviro+ in IoT applications as well. By connection it to Alexa you can get information about the temperature and humidity of the air by simply asking, or there's also an option to set up a trigger action with IFTTT that turns your Philips Hue lights on when the light level drops below a certain level etc.
Software
With the Python library you can control control all the parts of your Enviro+. There's a bunch of examples for each of the individual parts, an all-in-one example that shows you the data from Enviro+'s sensors in a visual way.
