What Would You Do with the Indoor Air Quality HAT for Raspberry Pi

Sounds like it would be a good fit to monitor the air quality in my 3D printer space.

Rick

Could probably do an indoor air quality jig.

Could connect to a smaller screen with SPI, if it doesn't use those, or it could use an external screen like the DSI one from Raspberry Pi Foundation. Looks interesting, if there's a roadtest I'd consider applying.

A good idea would be to use a LSTM AI Keras network to gather data and predict anomalies from a time series.Also build a real time dashboard to show the particulates density in real time.

Seems Interesting!

Cool idea.

The Renesas sensor says that it can detect foul odors.  Uh... control a bathroom exhaust fan.  Specifically, the shop bathroom.

There have been a number of historically bad wildfires across the western United States including the area I live in. I recently bought a portable HEPA filter To improve indoor air quality and it would be interesting to see how effective it is.  Absent fire it might also be used to see the influence of solder fumes, 3D printing, cooking and such on a living space and what impact the filter has.

I'm currently running the Honeywell Particulate Matter SensorHoneywell Particulate Matter Sensor to detect for pm2.5 and pm10 levels in the apartment (I've got a project log for that in hackaday https://hackaday.io/project/174293-bleifying-a-honeywell-pm-sensor). This seems to be measuring something else: total volatile organic compounds (tvoc) and not only returns the raw values, but also some sort of air quality level based on a standard. The air quality level seems the most interesting because it already defines for you what "bad quality" means.

Unlike the HPMS though, I don't see any fan or application note regarding air flow recommendations nor orientation. So I'm guessing installation would rely on the passive movement of air around it?

I can't see well from the attached picture but I'm guessing the view is from the top and will sit on top of the pi, and helpfully extends the gpios. This however would likely interfere with common pi cases, or will require that the pi's case have a removable top (and not connect the top). Which might be problematic because the pi4 (almost always) requires a heatsink and a fan even during idle.

kmikemoo's use case (option 4 in the manual) is interesting and is probably the industrial application (especially since it seems it can operate with a very bare mcu, as it can automatically trigger a signal based on quality changes), but I'm just worried that since we can't really enclose the pi we might be subjecting it to a far more corrosive environment than necessary. We can of course use it with a far cheaper pi zero but the hat form factor (as opposed to the pHat) means the hat will overhang the pi zero. Then again, with the extra real estate we also get a relative humidity and temp sensor, which again points to Renesas' intention to have the hat be a comprehensive environmental sensor.

I've got mixed feelings, and like the others I'm looking forward to read the road tests (and depending on the results, might get the sensor to complement my HPMS)

This board has some interesting features.

If it can detect ethenol, you could test to see if it can measure sobriety.

With winter coming, you can always use it to test CO2 build up and basic indoor air quality during the heating season.

DAB

After reading your posts I came up with a simplistic test using the device.

My daughter and her family have moved into the basement of my home. I have a large 52" ceiling fan that I purchased to move air to and from the basement during the summer and winter months. I find the house design causes air to settle air in the basement and put the fan would make a difference.

Now that I have tenants I'm curious what difference does the fan make in air? I know they continuously turn the fan off because it shares power from a common switch. When the fan loses power, it forgets that it is a fan and needs to be reprogrammed. When no one was using the switches it wasn't a problem.

As I review my methodology I can see flaws in my reasoning. I need to monitor both upper and lower environments plus not every day is the same in terms of air. It is a great experiment. I think I would also deploy it with the POE Hat Raspberry Pi4B (4GB) plus POE Hat - Review I received so it could be positioned without the restrictions of power.

I enjoy these analytical projects. It was great white boarding material while having coffee with the folks I worked with.

I think I would compare it with other sensors on the market, as I haven't been entirely satisfied with any of them for CO2. I think the gold-standard is still IR-based type sensors, but they are more expensive and bulky.

I currently have experience with the Sensiron SGP30 which is a CO2eq and TVOC sensor, and a Bosch BME680 which also claims to output VOC readings. The SGP30 seems to have a lot of "cross-sensitivity" effects which result in wacky CO2eq readings when hit by VOCs (e.g. just open up a bottle of ethanol next to it and it will go nuts). The Bosch BME680 is not entirely satisfactory either - instead of providing ppm/ppb concentrations, it reports VOC as a resistance change of an internal (presumably metal oxide) element.

Perhaps evaluating the cross-sensitivity behaviour under regular conditions and high-VOC concentrations would be a good activity, along with using it ordinarily in a bedroom to evaluate correlation in sensor values between the SGP30 and the Renesas solution. It would be good to see how well each of the sensors manage to handle the situations, as many of them are "self-calibrating" to a "background" of 400ppm, so the drift and accuracy in the long term would be good to know.

I think that the decision to evaluate the sensors in a Pi Hat could also cause problems which I'd be keen to check out - for example, the positioning of the sensors look close to where the Pi4 has the USB3 controller and previous Pis have a USB Hub and Network IC - all of these chips are known to be hot ICs, so I wonder whether the "high precision" of the sensors would be wasted given the close proximity when used "as a hat". Also having previously evaluated the Bosch CISS, Omron 2JCIE-EV-AR01 and BU/BL01 solutions, it might be nice to compare the temperature/RH performance versus the "industry standard" Sensirion SHT30 used in the latter solutions.

- Gough