Makers, students and enthusiasts looking for a new project to keep them busy may be interested in this Raspberry Pi air quality monitor which was featured in the recent Hackspace magazine issue 21. the project works with any Raspberry Pi and is easy to wire wrap using a SDS011 sensor although there are a variety of sensors available on the market depending on your needs. The Raspberry Pi Foundation explains a little more about why they’d selected the SDS011.
“Firstly, it’s cheap enough for many makers to be able to buy and build with. Secondly, it’s been reasonably well studied for accuracy. Both the hackAIR and InfluencAir projects have compared the readings from these sensors with more expensive, better-tested sensors, and the results have come back favourably.”
“Air is the very stuff we breathe. It’s about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% argon, and then there’s the assorted ‘other’ bits and pieces – many of which have been spewed out by humans and our related machinery. Carbon dioxide is obviously an important polluter for climate change, but there are other bits we should be concerned about for our health, including particulate matter. This is just really small bits of stuff, like soot and smog. They’re grouped together based on their size – the most important, from a health perspective, are those that are smaller than 2.5 microns in width (known as PM2.5), and PM10, which are between 10 and 2.5 microns in width. This pollution is linked with respiratory illness, heart disease, and lung cancer.”
.For full details on how to create your very own Raspberry Pi air quality monitoring system using a little Python 3 coding jump over to the official Raspberry Pi website by following the link below.
Source: Raspberry Pi air quality monitor
