Air Quality Sensor Version 1.0

If you think that all I've done over the last week is work on my Air Quality sensor you'd be wrong. But I have been quite busy with it. I've now got a proper menu system with messages and numeric input. Plus a box. The box has been particularly fun to design, especially as the Heltec micro controller, in common with lots of similar devices, doesn't seem to provide any way that it can be fitted into a case. I've ended up making a little clamp that holds it in position. I'm not happy with this, but then again I'm not crazy about my looks either - but what are you going to do? 

To say that the case is printed version 1.0 it has gone together quite well. I'm using the "dead cockroach" assembly technique, where you regard the chip as a dead cockroach lying on its back and connect the wires to the upturned legs. There are no components other than the devices that I'm wiring together. The only tricky bit is that the clock and the temperature sensor share the same SDA and SCL lines and so I've had to make up some custom cables. But it's all working, and now I have a box with all my sensors and whatnot that I can start to to build software for. 

This is the ugly truth about what's in the box. We'll gloss over the way that the wires for the RTC are too short to allow it to be fitted onto its mounting post, and the wire for the sensor is far too long......

The next step is to add a "WiFi Setup" mode that can be used to get the device onto the internet and then we can start pushing readings into the cloud. You can track the project on GitHub here. Bear in mind that this is a work in progress, and so nothing is fixed. This is all part of the Connected Humber Monitaire project, you can find out more here. 

More Air Quality Sensor Fun

The Air Quality Sensor is coming along nicely. It's sprouted a keyboard and a Real Time Clock. And a menu system. And half a box. 

Such fun. You can find all the bits on GitHub here, I'm posting the code as I create it, so it's not really usable at the moment, but it is fun. 

Building an Air Quality Sensor

I've been having proper fun today. I started with one of my tiny Heltec embedded controllers and an urge to connect it to an air quality sensor and a temperature/air pressure/humidity sensor. 

It wasn't easy, but it was possible. Biggest problem was that the temperature sensor uses an i2c connection to the Heltec device, and so does the lovely little OLED panel that you can see above showing numbers.

Turns out the way to make it work is to create another Wire instance and then use that for the temperature sensor. Anyhoo, it works. If you want to see the code you can find it here.

I've written everything using message pumps and state machines so that it should be possible to have all this working together without something getting stuck. 

Hull Meetups is becoming Connected Humber

Things are changing, but not changing. The c4di Hardware Group is turning into Connected Humber. We'll be meeting up at exactly the same time, in exactly the same place, doing pretty much the same things. Only more so.

We're going to turn the group into a Community Interest Company CIC, which will make it possible for us to do even more interesting things, and give us a recognisable presence when dealing with companies and local bodies. 

For existing members the biggest change is that you can now find out about meetups and what we are doing by using the Connected Humber website. We'll be bidding fond farewell to the Meetup site that we've used in the past and we have a Slack channel for members of the group. Ping me a message if you want an invite, or turn up to the meetup this Thursday (16th August). 

We've lots of community activities planned, starting with a project to build a network of Air Quality sensors that we plan to deploy around the area. Exciting times.