Monitor your world with Enviro and Enviro + Air Quality for Raspberry Pi! There's a whole bunch of fancy environmental sensors on these boards, and a gorgeous little full-colour LCD to display your data. They're the perfect way to get started with citizen science and environmental monitoring!
Monitor your world!
Enviro + Air Quality is designed for environmental monitoring, and lets you measure air quality (pollutant gases and particulates*), temperature, pressure, humidity, light, and noise level. When combined with a particulate matter sensor*, it's great for monitoring air quality just outside your house (more information below) and lets you contribute your data to citizen science efforts to monitor air quality via projects like Luftdaten.
Citizen science with Enviro + Air Quality
We've developed Enviro + Air Quality in collaboration with 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 + Air Quality 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 + Air Quality.
The analog gas sensor can be used to make qualitative measurements of changes in gas concentrations, so you can tell broadly if the three groups of gases are increasing or decreasing in abundance. Without laboratory conditions or calibration, you won't be able to say "the concentration of carbon monoxide is n parts per million", for example.
Temperature, air pressure and humidity can all affect particulate levels (and the gas sensor readings) too, so the BME280 sensor on Enviro + Air Quality is really important to understanding the other data that it outputs.
We've got a tutorial that shows you how to use Enviro + Air Quality 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.
