Overview

This guide will walk you through making an environmental monitoring device with GPS, Temperature, Humidity, Barometric Pressure, and Air Quality sensors, all updating to the cloud. Once build, this project takes readings occasionally and sends them to Adafruit IO, stamped with time and location. All that is required is an AC outlet and a WiFi network.

All done in CircuitPython with AirLift, our wireless co-processor that makes secure IoT projects a breeze. And we stick it in a cute weatherproof case so it can be deployed anywhere.

While one of these devices is useful to to monitor some environment (say your room, a greenhouse, or a garden area) many of them could be placed around a house or city to monitor conditions in various areas.  This collection of time and location stamped data could be very useful for determining pollution patterns and so forth.

The units are small, lightweight, and have minimal requirements (power and WiFi) so they can be placed almost anywhere for extended periods of time, or moved around.

When the unit starts up, it checks where it is. Every hour, it refreshes the time from AdafruitIO. Periodically it reads all its sensors and sends the readings to AdafuitIO. This is set to happen every 5 minutes in the code, but can be changed as required. The only limitation is that there has to be enough time between readings to let them be sent and AdafruitIO has some limitations on frequency of updates for the free and plus versions.

Parts