Enviro for Raspberry Pi

by Pimoroni

Monitor your world with Enviro and Enviro + Air Quality for Raspberry Pi!

There's a whole bunch of fancy environmental sensors on these boards, and a gorgeous little full-colour LCD to display your data. They're the perfect way to get started with citizen science and environmental monitoring!

Monitor your world!

Enviro + Air Quality is designed for environmental monitoring, and lets you measure air quality (pollutant gases and particulates*), temperature, pressure, humidity, light, and noise level. When combined with a particulate matter sensor*, it's great for monitoring air quality just outside your house (more information below) and lets you contribute your data to citizen science efforts to monitor air quality via projects like Sensor Community.

Enviro is designed for indoor monitoring, letting you measure temperature, pressure, humidity, light, and noise level. It's great for keeping tabs on what's going on in rooms in your house, office, or elsewhere. Push the data to server and you can view the data remotely from anywhere.

Enviro + Air Quality features

Enviro features

  • BME280 temperature, pressure, humidity sensor (datasheet)
  • LTR-559 light and proximity sensor (datasheet)
  • MEMS microphone (datasheet)
  • 0.96" colour LCD (160x80)
  • Pimoroni breakout-compatible pin header
  • pHAT-format board
  • Fully-assembled
  • Compatible with all 40-pin header Raspberry Pi models
  • Python library
  • Dimensions: 65x30x8.5mm

Citizen science with Enviro + Air Quality

We've developed Enviro + Air Quality in collaboration with the University of Sheffield, with the aim of letting you contribute real-time air quality data from your local area to open data projects like Sensor Community.

The alarming drop in our air quality is something that's really important to understand. Devices like Enviro + Air Quality allow fine-grained, detailed datasets that let us see shifts in air quality through time and across different areas of cities. The more devices that contribute data, the better quality the dataset becomes.

Particulate matter (PM) is made up of tiny particles that are a mix of sizes and types, like dust, pollen, mould spores, smoke particles, organic particles and metal ions, and more. Particulates are much of what we think of as air pollution. They can be measured, in size and quantity, by particulate matter sensors like the PMS5003 that you can connect to Enviro + Air Quality.

The analog gas sensor can be used to make qualitative measurements of changes in gas concentrations, so you can tell broadly if the three groups of gases are increasing or decreasing in abundance. Without laboratory conditions or calibration, you won't be able to say "the concentration of carbon monoxide is n parts per million", for example.

Temperature, air pressure and humidity can all affect particulate levels (and the gas sensor readings) too, so the BME280 sensor on Enviro + Air Quality is really important to understanding the other data that it outputs.

We've got a tutorial that shows you how to use Enviro + Air Quality and a few easily-available bits to build the board into a weather-proof housing that you can mount outside your house to monitor local air quality.

Indoor monitoring with Enviro

Enviro is designed especially for indoor monitoring. The temperature, humidity, light, and noise readings can be used to keep track of conditions in your home and, combined with the LCD to display the data and the proximity sensor for interaction, it makes an ideal headless monitoring device.

Why not combine it with some IoT smarts like an Alexa skill so that you can ask what the temperature or humidity is? Or you could set up a trigger action with IFTTT that turns your Philips Hue lights on when the light level drops below a certain level. There's loads of possibilities!

Software

We've put together a Python library to control all the parts of your Enviro and Enviro + Air Quality. There's a bunch of examples for each of the individual parts, all-in-one examples that shows you the data from the sensors in a visual way. There's also an example that shows you how to contribute data to Sensor Community (requires Enviro + Air Quality and particulate matter sensor).

Getting started

Have a read through our (exhaustive!) Getting Started with Enviro+ tutorial that walks you through how to install the software, how to run the code examples, and how to use the Python library.

Notes

  • Due to exciting global electronic parts shortages, some Enviro +s manufactured in 2021 have an ADS1115 ADC instead of the usual ADS1015. Our Python libraries have been updated to automatically detect and adjust for this chip change.

156 customer reviews

5 months ago
So far, it is an awesome product. I really want to build this into my home and may add more of these. I am putting the first one in my office area. It is cool and damp. I have purchased a sensor module so I can keep an eye on the air quality and other things in the air.
by Anonymous about Enviro for Raspberry Pi via REVIEWS.io
5 months ago
Had a great time with this project. The library of possibilities seems endless with the enviro+ with the raspberry pi. And thank you Pimoroni for very precise and easy to read setup instructions on the website. Great work!
by David about Enviro for Raspberry Pi via REVIEWS.io
8 months ago
Problematic if you want accurate humidity (accuracy impacted by pi related heat) but adorable in every other way.
by Anonymous about Enviro for Raspberry Pi via REVIEWS.io
8 months ago
The install documentation needs to be updated along with the repo as it doesn't work with the newest OSs for the Pi Zero or 4 without modifications that are probaby beyond the average user
by Gareth about Enviro for Raspberry Pi via REVIEWS.io
a year ago
Simply couldn't get this to work on Bookworm which was disappointing. However, once I installed Bullseye things improved drastically. Managed to get all the appropriate examples working and it has been chugging away now for days logging data. The temperature sensor isn't positioned that well as it appears to pick up the heat from the CPU but for my use that is not an issue. The range of the proximity aspects of the light sensor is a little disappointing - I was hoping to use it as a PIR but that isn't going to be possible
by Anonymous about Enviro for Raspberry Pi via REVIEWS.io
a year ago
I was very excited about this products as I wanted to dip my fingers in the RPi world while also monitoring the air quality in my room after buying an air purifier. At first I was amazed by this little thing, lots of examples provided so I didn't have to dig around to find code examples for all of the sensors. Well all of that would have been nice but I found some of the examples didn't work out of the box. Not a huge pain as I found github issues describing the problem but it would have been nice if those were fixed. Now let's talk about the data - in terms of the pm particles sensors, it seems to be working fine. Turning off my purifier results in higher numbers while turning it on full power lowers the numbers significantly. Also tested it with a candle next to the sensor and I don't think I'll ever light a candle in my room. Sadly, the much simpler (I would assume) sensor for temperature is all over the place. First of all, the different examples use a different compensation value so you will get different reading on them. You might wonder why there even is a compensation value. Well that's to accommodate for the heat generated by the chip. It makes sense, however, it doesn't account for the heat generated by the RPi it's connected to. Due to the temperature being off, pressure and humidity also take a hit as they rely on the temperature. After more research I found that I need to get a GPIO extender cable to isolate the heat from the RPi. Not a huge problem as they cost £5-6 but I am annoyed that this wasn't mentioned anywhere in the product page. With the cables being as cheap as they are I would have just included one with the package or at least warned about it since now I have to put another order through and pay for the delivery. In conclusion, a very cool product with lots of potential but sadly won't work out of the box and you will need to buy more items for it to work properly.
by Aleksandar about Enviro for Raspberry Pi via REVIEWS.io
a year ago
Easy set up. The display is small but helpful for monitoring and getting set. Lots of code examples to get started, and a few others on GitHub. Some needed updating.
by M about Enviro for Raspberry Pi via REVIEWS.io
a year ago
Looks a great little board, unfortunately , it doesn't appear to run well. Cannot get the Lcd screen to work or to recognise the particulate filter. Tried everything to get it going. Disappointed. Contacted Pimoroni not heard back from them , yet.
by Michael about Enviro for Raspberry Pi via REVIEWS.io
a year ago
Astoundingly bad examples with broken libraries. Why provide them if they don't work? Needs an extender to accurately measure temp (not mentioned in advert)
by Simon about Enviro for Raspberry Pi via REVIEWS.io

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