OurWeather – ESP8266 Air Quality Sensor Prototype
We are in the process of finalizing our design for the OurWeather Air Quality Sensor extender kit. While the final engineering hardware is not back from our factory, we wanted to prototype the software and hardware and do the final testing of our design. So, we built a prototype and used a cardboard box to test it.
What is OurWeather?
OurWeather is a weather kit designed for STEM Kids of all ages. It is a simple to assemble kit containing all the parts to make your own
weather station. No soldering required!
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The WeatherPlus (with an on board ESP8266) board behind the OurWeather Kit is a pretty cool board and is designed to be modified by the user. We supply the source code (using the Arduino IDE) and you can use an inexpensive FTDI cable to connect to and reprogram the OurWeather kit.
Highly Sophisticated Testing Apparatus and Chamber
Well, not really. After working on the prototype software (not integrated into the OurWeather software yet) for a couple of days, we had the sensor reading and responding in an reasonable fashion. We learned that you did need to let the sensor heat up for 60 seconds to start getting readings.
So here is what we did. We let the sensor heat up for 60 seconds and then started our Arduino IDE software running on the OurWeather-WeatherPlus board. Then we picked up the can of hair spray (brand unimportant folks) and sprayed into our corrugated testing chamber and, WOW! the sensor went crazy. Output below:
------------------------------ ------------------------------ OurWeather - Air Quality Sensor Test ------------------------------ ------------------------------ Completed Setup Sensor_Value=78--->Fresh Air Sensor_Value=78--->Fresh Air Sensor_Value=79--->Fresh Air Sensor_Value=81--->Fresh Air Sensor_Value=832--->Very High Pollution Detected Sensor_Value=847--->Very High Pollution Detected Sensor_Value=821--->Very High Pollution Detected Sensor_Value=826--->Very High Pollution Detected Sensor_Value=839--->Very High Pollution Detected Sensor_Value=834--->Very High Pollution Detected Sensor_Value=811--->Very High Pollution Detected Sensor_Value=788--->Very High Pollution Detected Sensor_Value=779--->Very High Pollution Detected Sensor_Value=768--->Very High Pollution Detected Sensor_Value=758--->Very High Pollution Detected Sensor_Value=717--->Very High Pollution Detected Sensor_Value=638--->High Pollution Sensor_Value=544--->High Pollution Sensor_Value=457--->High Pollution Sensor_Value=399--->Low Pollution Sensor_Value=352--->Low Pollution Sensor_Value=309--->Low Pollution Sensor_Value=281--->Low Pollution Sensor_Value=260--->Low Pollution Sensor_Value=238--->Low Pollution Sensor_Value=221--->Low Pollution Sensor_Value=210--->Low Pollution Sensor_Value=205--->Low Pollution Sensor_Value=189--->Fresh Air Sensor_Value=174--->Fresh Air
The exacting science of this experiment can be seen in the video below: