Citizen science air quality monitoring

We've developed this board in collaboration with Dr Nate Adams at the University of Sheffield, with the aim of letting you contribute real-time air quality data from your local area to open data projects like Luftdaten.

The alarming drop in our air quality is something that's really important to understand. Devices like Enviro+ allow fine-grained, detailed datasets that let us see shifts in air quality through time and across different areas of cities. The more devices that contribute data, the better quality the dataset becomes.

Particulate matter (PM) is made up of tiny particles that are a mix of sizes and types, like dust, pollen, mould spores, smoke particles, organic particles and metal ions, and more. Particulates are much of what we think of as air pollution. They can be measured, in size and quantity, by particulate matter sensors like the PMS5003 that you can connect to Enviro+.

Temperature, air pressure and humidity can all affect particulate levels too, so the BME280 sensor on Enviro+ is really important to understanding the particulate data too.

We've got a tutorial (coming soon) that shows you how to use Enviro+ and a few easily-available bits to build the board into a weather-proof housing that you can mount outside your house to monitor local air quality.

Indoor monitoring

As well as outdoor air quality monitoring, Enviro+ is really good for indoor monitoring too. The temperature, humidity, light, and noise readings can be used to keep track of conditions in your home and, combined with the LCD to display the data and the proximity sensor for interaction, it makes an ideal headless monitoring device.

Why not combine it with some IoT smarts like an Alexa skill so that you can ask what the temperature or humidity is? Or you could set up a trigger action with IFTTT that turns your Philips Hue lights on when the light level drops below a certain level. There's loads of possibilities!

Software

We've put together a Python library to control all the parts of your Enviro+. There's a bunch of examples for each of the individual parts, an all-in-one example that shows you the data from Enviro+'s sensors in a visual way. There's also an example that shows you how to contribute data to Luftdaten (requires particulate matter sensor).

Getting started

Have a read through our (exhaustive!) Getting Started with Enviro+ tutorial that walks you through how to install the software, how to run the code examples, and how to use the Enviro+ Python library.