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  • Author Author: ntewinkel
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Introducing My 'In the Air Tonight' Project: Monitoring Air Quality in the Garage and Home - Blog 1

ntewinkel
Introducing My 'In the Air Tonight' Project: Monitoring Air Quality in the Garage and Home - Blog 1

Hello!

I was selected by element14 and Renesas to take part of the Summer Of Sensors - In the Air Tonight challenge.

For this challenge I want to build a sensor project that tracks air quality in my garage and in my house in rooms near the garage. The garage is one of the most dangerous spaces of most homes, as it is subject not only to car exhaust, but also to volatiles such as paints, solvents, and gasoline that often gets stored there.

For my specific test I intend to track how the air quality in a garage is affected by a car coming and going, and whether extra ventilation is recommended. I also want to see if an attached garage poses indoor air quality risks within the attached home.

Assuming the sensor has the capability of being read directly by a separate microcontroller, I hope to ultimately have a microcontroller read the AQI data from the sensor, connect via WiFi to my home network, and send the information via MQTT to my Raspberry Pi server that is running NodeRed with InfluxDB. That would allow me to conveniently track the air quality index AQI from any browser in the home, including my cell phone.

The kit arrived a few days ago, thank you element14 and Renesas!

Renesas Summer of Sensors In the Air Tonight Kit


I'm looking forward to experimenting with it over the next few months.
My first steps will be to test out the kits with the provided software, to get a better understanding of what the sensors can do, and hopefully also learn a little about how the sensor data gets collected.

-Nico

  • in reply to osjef

    My kit actually only included just 1 sensor. The box says it contains 3 sensors, but I think they adjusted these kits for this challenge. 

    Thanks for pointing out about the data sheet - I2C would be a nice way to access that tiny little sensor. And then I won't need to figure out how to get the Windows eval software working Laughing

  • in reply to misaz

    Shame about the alert pin (but I guess that was just a nice-to-have). The fixed I2C address is annoying! Adafruit do some nice I2C multiplexers though, so maybe that'll come in handy.

  • in reply to osjef

    HS4001 address is fixed and not configurable. Only way to use more than one device is using I2C switch or using multiple I2C buses.

    Using Alert feature is sadly also impossible because sensor board do not expose this pin from sensor.

    I gues challengers received this kit for temperature and humidity compensations which can be provided to the algorithm for improving results.

  • Looking at the datasheet for the HS4001 sensor module, the output is I2C, so you should be able to hook it up very easily to a microcontroller (such as an Arduino). Sounds like the kit comes with 3 sensors too, so you can connect them all together in parallel, set their I2C addresses to be different and then you can communicate with them all from the same micro.

    Also from glancing through the datasheet I see their is something they call an "alert" pin which is basically an interrupt pin which you can configure to trip at certain thresholds, so that might be something interesting you might want to use.

    Sounds like a fun project! Looking forward to seeing how you get on.