Enviro + Air quality Hat from Pomoroni

The Pimoroni's Enviro + Air Quality Hat to make environmental monitoring with your Raspberry-Pi

This hat is designed to monitor environmental data with Enviro (and also Enviro + Air Quality) with the Raspberry Pi! This board contains a lot of environmental sensors as well as a gorgeous little full-colour LCD used to display data and graphics. This a perfect set to start environmental and science monitoring. This set is designed to be fully portable!

The Enviro is fitted with a port to connect a "Air Quality" particule matter module (not included) and lets you measure air quality, temperature, pressure, humidity, light, and noise level. When combined with a particulate matter sensor this board can also measure pollutant gases and particulates.

This board is great to measure air quality just outside of  house (see below) and lets you contribute your data to citizen science efforts to monitor air quality via projects like Luftdaten.

Enviro is designed for indoor monitoring, letting you measure temperature, pressure, humidity, light, and noise level to keep an eyes on what's happening in your office, house, garage, etc. Pushing the data to a server (eg: with MQTT) will allow you to collect remote location data and visualize them.

Technical details

• BME280 temperature, pressure, humidity sensor (datasheet)
• LTR-559 light and proximity sensor (datasheet)
• MICS6814 analog gas sensor (datasheet)
• ADS1015 analog to digital converter (ADC) (datasheet)
• MEMS microphone (datasheet)
• 0.96" colour LCD (160x80)
• Connector for particulate matter (PM) sensor (available separately, do not hesitate )
• Pimoroni breakout-compatible pin header
• pHAT-format board
• Fully-assembled
• Compatible with all 40-pin header Raspberry Pi models
• Pinout
• Python library
• Dimensions: 65x30x8.5mm

Citizen science with Enviro + optional Air Quality

When Pimoroni developed Enviro + Air Quality in collaboration with the University of Sheffield, the aim was to collect real-time air quality data from local areas to open data projects like Luftdaten.

The air quality is degrading and this become alarming. That's really important to understand it. Devices like Enviro + Air Quality allow create fine-grained, detailed datasets that let us to see and navigates in air quality through data collected in different areas of cities. Ideally, the more devices are contributing to data collection, the higher quality the dataset will be.

The Particulate matter (PM, module not included) is made up of tiny dust, pollen, spore, smoke particule, organic particle, metal ions, etc that are mixed in the air. The mix of particles of various size can be measured/evaluated with a special light based device. The PM sensor like PMS5003 can evaluate the density of particule per size in the air... which allows to estimate the air quality. The diesel particule are very small (PM 2.5) and get inside the lungs, identifying such small particles in the air is an indicator of bad air quality (should I said very bad).

The MICS6814 gas sensor can be used to evaluate the changes in gas concentrations, so you can tell when the abundance of the three groups of gases are increasing or decreasing. The air quality decreases when the measured gas concentration increases. Please note that measured gaz won't be able to say "the concentration of carbon monoxide is n parts per million" without laboratory calibration and usage in laboratory conditions.

Thank to the BME280 sensor, we can measure temperature, air pressure and humidity. Such parameters will affect particulate levels in the air (and will also impact the gas sensor readings).
The BME280 sensor on Enviro + Air Quality is really important to understanding the variation of the the other data.

Pimoroni offers tutorial that shows you how to use Enviro + Air Quality (the PM module) 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 with Enviro

Enviro is designed especially for indoor monitoring. 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. The Enviro  it makes an ideal headless monitoring device.

If you are already aware about Alexa and have some skill to deal with this IoT vocal service, the Enviro hat could be used to respond in a question like "Alexa, could you tell about the temperature and humidity?". You could also use the IFTTT service to trigger a Philips Hue lights switch on when the light level drops below a certain level. So much possibilities!