Air Quality Monitor
Overview
Understanding and controlling indoor air quality can reduce the risk of health concerns and improve the comfort of building occupants.
This reference design demonstrates how to measure ambient air quality within an indoor environment using the Golioth IoT platform.
Specifically, the following environmental parameters can be monitored:
- 🦠 Airborne particulate matter (PM)
- 😷 CO₂
- 💦 Relative humidity
- 🌡️ Temperature
- 💨 Pressure
Blog post
Read more about this project and use case on the Air Quality Monitor blog post.
Business Use Case
Buildings are responsible for 40 percent of global energy consumption and people spend about 90% of their time indoors. A number of adverse health impacts have been associated with poor ventilation and exposure to airborne particulate matter (PM). Furthermore, increased CO₂ levels may be a proxy indicator for risk of COVID-19 exposure indoors.
Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) monitoring can create healthier, more comfortable work spaces, and protect employees from harmful exposure to airborne pollutants. Increased awareness of the impact of poor air quality on health, along with the global impact of COVID-19, is expected to increase demand for intelligent monitoring and control of building HVAC systems. According to the Department of Energy, HVAC systems use about 35% of a building's energy on average. By measuring IAQ parameters, energy consumption can be optimized by ensuring that ventilation is based on actual demand.
The Golioth IoT cloud platform can dramatically accelerate the development, deployment, and management of intelligent demand-based IAQ solutions at scale.
Block Diagram
Device Photos
Parts List
- Electronics
- Nordic nRF9160 LTE-M/NB-IoT SiP on a Sparkfun Thing Plus nRF9160 board
- Bosch BME280 humidity (+temperature/pressure) sensor on a MikroE Weather Click board
- Sensirion SCD41 CO₂ sensor on a MikroE HVAC Click board
- Sensirion SPS30 particulate matter (PM) sensor wired to the MikroE HVAC Click board
- Golioth Aludel-Mini carrier board
- Li-Poly battery
- Mechanical / Enclosure
- CU-1937-MB ABS Enclosure from Bud Industriries (~3.1"x3.1")
- Data
Dashboard
The Grafana dashboard connects to the Golioth REST API to show LightDB data streamed from the Air Quality Monitor.
Next Steps
This air quality monitor reference design is a great starting point for your own proof of concept. The next step is to integrate the components used in this reference design into your own custom hardware implementation. This includes designing a custom PCB and choosing an enclosure that meets your requirements in the field.
Please contact [email protected] for access to the hardware design and firmware source code files for this and other Golioth reference designs.