Air Quality Monitor
I think high co2 and voc levels in almost every building i spend time in are probably pretty dangerous. I want to
make a diy air quality monitor to fix the problem. It will involve an arduino, or a raspberry pi, or an esp32, or all 3,
along with several sensors. There are lots of examples of this all over the internet. I'm going to first try to find
these examples, then try to price out some of them, then build a small one, probably just a temperature monitor. Then
I'll make the real one with help from ws1. I think it will also involve a locally hosted website and/or records of
levels of the different monitored things over time.
Temperature Sensor Links and Notes
arduino example code
got error, "couldn't find sht31", this is most likely because i didn't solder it to the pins. It seems to be on, so i thought this might be
good enough to test the sample code, but maybe it's not fully connected. need to get soldering iron, then solder it.
Temperature Sensor I ordered
I was thinking i already have a temp sensor somewhere, but I looked for my arduino stuff and I found only about half of it, I don't think it's exactly lost, but
it's lost enough so that it was becoming an obstaccle that was delaying this project, so I just ordered a kind of nice seeming one. It is the sensirion sht31d.
I am aware that this sounds like shit 31 or something, but that's not my fault, shit 31 doesn't mean anything anyway, and i don't have much of a choice other than to ignore it.
It might take a while, probably at least until february to arrive. Then i plan to get the sample code to work, then i plan to try to use it with grafana.
It arrived in the mail. see random notes.
sht-31d
Random research notes.
2-21-2023 update
Last week I again left materials in two different places, have now decided to have them all in my condo as that's where i am 90 percent of the time. I'll get the
stuff tomorrow. I should do this with any small project that doesn't involve woodworking or building bigger things, though i was thinking i'd do the soldering
at ws2.
2-8-2023 update
I got the arduino set up with the pi400 and the temp sensor and attempted to run the sample code with the temp sensor, but i didn't solder the temp sensor together,
got an error, something like temp sensor not found, maybe i need to solder it as the instructions say, so i'm going to do that but i need to
get my soldering stuff from ws2. If the error still happens, i'll try to run it with python and a raspberry pi. If that has an error and
i can't find anything helpful online about that either, i guess i'll try a different temp sensor. Probably though, it isn't connected and needs to be soldered
like the instructions say, i really think that's it, or that's the most likely thing so i'll try that first.
1-31-2023 update
I ordered and received the temperature sensor. I want to work on it on my pi400, which is a mini project of its own. I reinstalled the os and
installed the arduino ide.
Two Temperature sensors i considered ordering
df robot
https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2012.html
https://wiki.dfrobot.com/SHT30%20Digital%20Temperature%20and%20Humidity%20Sensor%20SKU%3A%20SEN0330"
adafruit
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-sht31-d-temperature-and-humidity-sensor-breakout
Solderless board idea
in one of these videos, i need to find out which one, a guy uses a "solderless board" and a "hammer" to connect all the sensors and pins instead of
soldering. Maybe this is something for beginners or something that an some imaginary electronics expert somewhere would despise, but it looked pretty sweet
to me. I don't have any real love for breathing in solder fumes, and if i could just use such a solderless board, then 3d print my own case around
the board with all of the "hammered on" components, i think that might be better for me. I'd like to try it anyway, see if there's
anything not to like about it.
It was this one. It wasn't like how i remembered it at all lol.
I remember something more like this
could be useful or maybe i'll just give up on this idea and do it normally.
future things to research/things to do note 1-12-2023.
-list known sensors
-find out what is all this mq stuff. is there an mq series of sensors? what does mq stand for?
-find out more about grafana, prometheus, the different types of software many people seem to like.
-find videos/websites that are just about the sht-30 sensor
-order the sht-30 sensor. (update: ordered sht31d)
-create a materials list for minor temperature monitor project. plan to use it with some form of all 3: arduino, pi, and esp32(find out of that's possible too).
1/12/2023 more initial youtube research.
I am going to try to do an in depth analysis of at least 3 videos, jeff geerling's, michael klements', and whatever that one
is where the guy has almost every sensor, i'll have to find it again. I don't know how i feel personally about jeff geerling,
i actually like michael klements the best in general i think, and i followed a michael klements tutorial to make my
solar powered duco coin miner, which yeah, crypto collapsed, but the solar powered pi zero w that basically was making infinite money
off the grid (over time it would at least) was a pretty succsssful project i felt like.
But I have to say jeff's video has at least one sensor, the sht-30 temperature and humidity sensor that is cheap and would be easy to learn from.
They all seem to really like something called grafana and prometheus, that seem
to be databases/graphs that record and nicely display the entire history of air quality data you are picking up. so if i just bought that
sht30 sensor, i could use only it and one of the zero w's and/or arduino unos i already have along with grafana or whatever it is they're doing
and keep track of just the temperature and humidity, but this is a good first step, it would let me take some of the uncertainty out of the web
part of this project, and also would make me actually turn on a microcontroller or two, turn on my pi400, and open up the arduino ide, things
which i haven't done for a few weeks.
i should also mention that the co2 sensor in the michael klements video, the
DFRobot Gravity: Analog Infrared CO2 Sensor for Arduino
was the sensor that i remember concluding was the best when i looked into this in the beginning of 2022. I still think it's the best. It's also
the most expensive, and there are a few cheaper options, all of which i plan to list. I don't plan to buy it today, because i'm just going to get
the cheap temperature sensor for now until i'm sure of what sensors i really want, which will take time.
I found out the channel that had the one with a ton of different sensors was howtomechatronics.
So Here's the 3 links again:
jeff geerling sht-30 sensor, good organization, good software ideas.
michael klements, best co2 sensor, nice 3d printed case.
how to mechatronics, wide variety of sensors to investigate.
sht-30 sensor:
1/11/2023 initial youtube research.
I have looked into doing this before, and maybe i'll find the folders with that, but for now i'll just start over.
Of course I usually start with youtube, but I will make an attempt to find other sources too, like pimag, instructables,
even thingiverse, just anywhere that isn't youtube. But i'll start at the beginning so below are some notes i took about
youtube videos i tried to watch through while i was doing other things like hanging up clothes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esY_OtDLv7g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXGf0EcIW9Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF27dp4RA0g
go through each of these videos, price them out
list what they detect, list what device they use, whether
they lend themselves to being or transmitting data to
a locally hosted web page.
list known specific sensors like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdvzQpFzne8
mq-135
list what they detect, what sbcs/mcs they work with
what sensors do you really need?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL0L-nic9Vw
see if you can find designs etc on thingiverse, related to printed cases for
specific sensors.