The kit has arrived!
As I have just unboxed the dev kit, I wanted to scratch down my initial thoughts.
I had expected something of a retail box with glamorous pictures of the future emblazoned on the outer and on reflection I have no idea why. This is a dev kit and aimed at industrial development. In my work I've ordered a lot of industry specific kit over the years and it has always been plain boxed.
I even prefer a simple plain box that is suitably engineered to protect the contents.
I'll save the full break down of the box and contents for a later post, but I am surprised at the manner of packaging inside the box. There is some damage to one of the pin sets, and getting the arduino/shield/screen assembly out of the bag was quite a fiddle!
Inside the box, the components are as expected. Following assembly of the sensors onto the shield, I can see a couple of potential issues.
The connector for the humidity probe can be readily inserted the wrong way around as can the CO2 sensor. For the CO2 sensor there is a silk screen on the shield identifying the pin outs but nothing on the daughter board.
Am I being too picky?
Possibly the best thing about the board is that it was pre programmed with the evaluation board software. Plugging the USB into the computer and it sprung straight to life. I should note that the display is far better quality than these pictures suggest. It is displaying values that I would expect and I gather from initial reading of the technical data that some time may be required for self calibration.
So whats next?
I didn't expect to get into this road test and so I'd already started something similar, shown above. I currently have a basic dust sensor and humidity/temp sensor hooked into an arduino and logging to an SD card. The project will be to monitor cabin air quality in my car, I have a good long commute in some slow traffic.
After setting a baseline, I'll look to making some changes in the cabin air filtration (pollen rather than dust filter) and see if improvements are realised. I'm also aware of the impacts of CO2 on concentration and irritability while driving so it will be interesting to see day to day changes.
Ultimately this will feed into the work my company does in automotive research and I suspect some of the learning can be directly applied.
PS
I'm really struggling to get decent pictures. I'm using a Lumix GF3 and most of my troubles seem to step from non natural light. I'd love any pointers!
Top Comments