Talking Air Quality at South Hunsley school

David got in touch a while back. Would I like to talk to his students at South Hunsley school? Would I? Oh yes. So today it was into the bag with the Air Quality Sensor Top Hat and a few other goodies and then off back to school. They were a great bunch of folks. And they were even polite enough to laugh at my first (and only) joke. I was talking about air quality, hardware, self promotion and whatnot. I said at the time I’d put some useful links onto my blog (always a good way to drive traffic). Here they are.

To find out about the Arduino and get the software you can go here.

To make yourself poorer buying things from China you can go here. You can get cheap Arduino Uno devices, along with a whole bunch of other hardware.

If you want to buy one of the tiny LoRa enabled devices with a screen search for “Heltec LoRa”. The devices are sold in pairs for some reason, make sure you get the ones which are marked as 868Mhz.

You can also get the tiny cheap WiFi devices here, search for “Lolin D1 mini”.

If you want to get an air quality sensor you can get one of the good ones by searching for “SDS011”. If you want to measure temperature, pressure and humidity, search for “BME280”.

If you want some fun coloured leds search for “WS2812” followed by “ring”, “strip” or “panel”. These are dead easy to interface to any of the devices I’ve mentioned above. But make sure you get hold of a properly beefy power supply if you are driving more than 12 or so to full brightness.

I’ve not had a problem buying from China. In over 50 orders I’ve only had one not turn up, and I’ve only had a couple of broken devices.

You can find my Air Quality stuff on GitHub here. That has drivers for the hardware that you can buy and there are also circuit diagrams and box designs.