Breathe easy, knowing that you can track and sense the quality of the air (and environment!) around you with an IoT Air Quality Sensor. This sensor measures PM2.5 (particles that are 2.5 microns or smaller in diameter) dust concentrations, temperature and humidity. This sensor is small, wall-mountable (indoors or outdoors), weatherproof, and only requires a WiFi network connection and an AC outlet.

You'll assemble an open source air quality sensor. Then, you'll program the sensor using CircuitPython to measure air quality data and periodically send measurements to Adafruit IO, our incredible IoT Service. Finally, you'll create a beautiful Adafruit IO dashboard to visualize your sensor data from anywhere in the world.

Why would I want to build an Air Quality Monitor?

Citizen Science

Soon after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, trustworthy information about radiation levels was publicly unavailable. An international volunteer organization, Safecast, designed devices for radiation mapping and openly shared their measurements to the public. 

With the increasing amount of natural disasters, building an open source air quality monitor is a step towards citizens being able to monitor and share data about essential environmental measurements without the need to trust an environmental regulatory body or wait for an official government response

Open Source Science

While building this sensor, we noticed a large amount of the current air quality sensor offerings on the market are closed source software and have a private API. This means it's impossible to send data from a DIY air quality sensor to their web service. If we purchased one of the company sponsored sensors and the company went out of business, we'd be left with a sensor which couldn't send data to the internet.

Building an own open source air quality monitoring sensor lets you control the hardware going into your IoT air quality sensor, the software running on the sensor (right down to the firmware!) and the web platform. We are using Adafruit.io for this guide, but you are free to modify the code to send data to other services such as Google Cloud Platform, Amazon AWS IoT, or Microsoft Azure IoT.

Parts

Angled shot of a Adafruit Feather M4 Express.
It's what you've been waiting for, the Feather M4 Express featuring ATSAMD51. This Feather is fast like a swift, smart like an owl, strong like a ox-bird (it's half ox,...
$22.95
In Stock
Angled shot of Adafruit AirLift FeatherWing.
Give your Feather project a lift with the Adafruit AirLift FeatherWing - a FeatherWing that lets you use the powerful ESP32 as a WiFi co-processor. You probably have your...
$12.95
In Stock
Person soldering next to sensor, which detects the fumes and lights up an LED red
Breathe easy, knowing that you can track and sense the quality of the air around you with the PM2.5 Air Quality Sensor with Breadboard Adapter particulate sensor....
$39.95
In Stock
Adafruit BME280 I2C or SPI Temperature Humidity Pressure Sensor
Bosch has stepped up their game with their new BME280 sensor, an environmental sensor with temperature, barometric pressure and humidity! This sensor is great for all sorts...
$14.95
In Stock
Double prototyping feather wing PCB with socket headers installed
This is the FeatherWing Doubler - a prototyping add-on and more for all Feather boards. This is similar to our
$7.50
In Stock
Flanged Weatherproof Enclosure With PG-7 Cable Glands
Whether you're raiding tombs or traversing nuclear fallout wastelands, this is the most heavy-duty enclosure for your project! Weatherproof? Check. Tough polycarbonate cover?...
$9.95
In Stock
1 x Silicone Stranded Cable
Silicone Cover Stranded-Core Ribbon Cable - 4 Wires 1 Meter Long - 30 AWG Black
1 x Lipo Battery
Lithium Ion Polymer Battery, ideal For Feathers - 3.7V 400mAh
1 x USB Power Supply
5V 2A Switching Power Supply w/ USB-A Connector
1 x 6ft Micro-USB Cable
USB A/Micro Cable - 2m

This guide was first published on Oct 16, 2020. It was last updated on Mar 15, 2024.

This page (Overview) was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

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