| I think this is the main way to go if you care about air quality because unfortunately most consumer air quality monitors can be wildly inaccurate (i.e. detect nothing at all) even in day-to-day scenarios like making toast [0]. It's not limited to particulate matter either. You can get devices with reasonably accurate basics like temperature and humidity but as soon as you get into the actual air quality stuff like CO2, things start to fall apart. There are tons of devices that use wildly inaccurate TVOC sensors or fake their CO2 measurements (they estimate it based on H2 instead). If you want anything remotely close to accuracy, I strongly recommend buying something that actually tells you which sensors it has inside it. Get datasheets for the sensors and check that their specs are reasonable for what you want. For example make sure that if you want to actually measure CO2 to buy something with an NDIR sensor like the Senseair S8 inside. I wanted something I could plug into my home Prometheus/InfluxDB/Grafana setup so I bought [1] from Taobao. It lists all the sensors it uses, which are fairly good for the price. The device has a pretty simple TCP API that gives you JSON. Everything is Chinese but the measurements themselves are labelled in English and Google Translate works pretty well on the documentation. 0: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180822091022.h... 1: https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=550317428831 |
I appreciate the option you linked and wish there was an English version of it. If you were to build a consumer product, which air quality sensors would you want in it?