Introduction
Last winter there was quite thick air in my apartment complex. Several neighbours had used wood stoves instead of gas heating to heat their apartments. This caused quite a lot of fine dust in the air so one did not want to be outside at all in the evening.
Today I found these four wood piles alone (they are ready for the next winter), and that's just one house in my neighbourhood (it has multiple staircases):
This unpleasant experience last winter made me look for a particulate matter sensor to measure the apparent bad outdoor air and compare it with WHO standards.
My choice fell on the SPS30 sensor from the company Sensirion. This sensor can be connected via I2C or UART interface to an MCU or a Raspberry PI (I will be using I2C).
Here is the overview of which hardware and software will be used in the project:
Hardware:
- Raspberry Pi 3B+
- SPS30 Particulate Matter (PM) sensor
- SPS30 Interface HAT PCB (with nice purple colour)
- Enclosure
Software:
- Python
- ThingSpeak IoT Platform
In the second part, let's look at the sensor closer. Link to the Sensor blog post
