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Are there good sensors for pollen?

cstanton

I realised that I've never thought about how pollen is tracked.

 

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I keep thinking about creating a weather station to put just outside, maybe connecting it over lorawan and having sensors that pick up this, water level, wind, temperature, all so I can collect it and present it on some kinda dashboard to prepare me for the day ahead, and pollen would be really good to have since I suffer from all sorts of allergies (frankly even picking up dust levels in the house would also be good). However I realise I don't even know where to start!

 

I wonder if this's mostly a time of year calculation based upon seasons and life cycle of the plants, or is it actually detected in the air?

 

How do you even differentiate between different pollen in the air? Are/is there particular sensors that're better for this than others? How do you differentiate between pollen and dust? What about pollution levels?

Parents

  • Hi Christopher,

     

    There's a fancy Sensirion sensor hereSensirion sensor here, looks like it reports different particle size ranges, which is unique. It isn't cheap, but for that functionality maybe it's worth it.

    Farnell had a lower-cost Sharp sensor (I'm guessing the Sharp and the Mitsubishi ones are originally intended for air-con?) but I can't find it any more, and I can't recall what particle range size it sensed : (

  • in reply to shabaz

    I was super-curious to try out this sensor since sibling is pollen-sensitive, so decided to bite the bullet and order it.

    Hopefully some simple code to exercise it can be written in a free hour or two, hopefully within a week. I'll use sibling for calibration since Jan and others are too far!

  • in reply to shabaz

    The SPS30 is a great particulate monitor sensor - I've run one for about 8 months now. They definitely easily detect bushfire smoke (yep, Australia) and my neighbour's wood fired smoke quite easily. Dust storms also show up quite easily. One of my colleagues did some correlation with local monitoring stations operated by our governmental authorities and the sensor seems to be quite accurate. It's more expensive than an ordinary "dust" sensor, but they do separate PM1/2.5/4/10 and internally calculates counts and mass figures. The connection wire is the big issue - I didn't have anything that would plug into it, so I soldered wires to the pins and blobbed it with hot glue as a quick fix.

     

    - Gough

  • in reply to Gough Lui

    Ohh drat.. I didn't notice the connector, too expensive to to place that as an order for a single item now due to delivery charges : (

    Still, what you did seems like a fine idea, to convert it to something that will fit a microcontroller board anyway.

    I'm keen to see what it detects non-pollen-related too (I'm near an airport, and quite a few small factories are not many miles away).

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  • in reply to Gough Lui

    Ohh drat.. I didn't notice the connector, too expensive to to place that as an order for a single item now due to delivery charges : (

    Still, what you did seems like a fine idea, to convert it to something that will fit a microcontroller board anyway.

    I'm keen to see what it detects non-pollen-related too (I'm near an airport, and quite a few small factories are not many miles away).

Children