Sensors for measuring what's going on around your project - from temperature, humidity and air quality to light, distance and motion. Most are compact breakouts that connect to a Raspberry Pi, Pico or other microcontroller, with our own sensor boards alongside a wide range from Adafruit.
Choosing a sensor
- Temperature and humidity sensors cover everything from general environmental monitoring to precision measurements. The SHT40 and SHT45 measure temperature and humidity, while the TMP117 specialises in high-accuracy temperature measurement. The popular BME280 combines temperature and humidity with atmospheric pressure sensing.
- Air quality sensors can measure a variety of gases and environmental conditions. The BME690 combines temperature, humidity, pressure and gas sensing, while sensors like the SCD-41 measure CO2 and the SGP41 detects VOCs and NOx.
- Distance and proximity sensors let your projects detect objects without touching them. Time-of-flight sensors like the VL53L1X measure distance to a single point, while the VL53L5CX produces an 8x8 grid of measurements for a simple depth map.
- Motion and orientation sensors include accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers and IMUs. They can detect movement and rotation or determine which way your project is pointing, with some sensors performing the necessary sensor fusion themselves.
- Light and colour sensors range from straightforward ambient light measurements to RGB colour and multi-channel spectral sensing. They're useful for automatic lighting, displays, colour detection and experiments with different parts of the visible spectrum.
If you need a bit of everything, our Multi-Sensor Stick combines temperature, humidity, pressure, light, proximity and motion sensing on one handy board.
Connecting sensors
Many of our sensor breakouts use I2C, a simple two-wire interface that lets several sensors share the same bus. That makes it easy to connect them to Raspberry Pi, Pico and a huge range of other microcontrollers. Some sensors use other interfaces such as SPI, UART or analogue signals, so it's worth checking the individual product page if you're planning a particular combination.
Lots of our sensor boards also have a Qw/ST connector, compatible with Qwiic and STEMMA QT. Just add a JST-SH cable and you can connect sensors without soldering or a nest of jumper wires. You can also browse all our Qw/ST-compatible breakouts.