Measuring air quality with the Raspberry Pi

Lead Image © Oleksiy Tsupe, 123RF.com

Fresh Air

Monitor your environment with a Raspberry Pi and an air quality sensor.

As you know from prior columns and articles, the folks at SwitchDoc Labs have always had a passion for building weather instruments and sensors. Recently, we had a successful Kickstarter project for a product called "OurWeather." Basically, it's a complete weather station kit using Grove connectors to minimize soldering and make the electronics more accessible to people that aren't crazy about soldering in general.

The kit is based on an ESP8266 WiFi computer and can be programmed with the Arduino IDE. The product is doing quite well, and people are starting to ask for extender kits to sense more environmental variables. The first sensor I want to build is an air quality sensor (AQS) based on the TP-401A indoor air quality gas sensor (Figure 1). The components you will need for this project are shown in the "Parts List" box.

The TP-401A connects to the Raspberry Pi (Rasp Pi) using a Grove 4-channel, 16-bit, analog-to-digital converter (one of the missing boards for the Rasp Pi!). The Rasp Pi logs data and graphs the results with the new Raspberry data logging and graphing software. MatPlotLib produces the graphs on the Rasp Pi.

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