Enviro Indoor (Pico W Aboard)

by Pimoroni

A wireless environmental monitoring board to keep track of inside conditions in your home, office or other habitat. Onboard sensors can measure temperature, humidity, pressure, gas and light.

The top of the range BME688 sensor on Enviro Indoor can measure temperature/humidity/pressure with a high degree of precision, and the gas scanner will react to changes in volatile organic compounds (VOCs), volatile sulfur compounds (VSCs) and the presence of carbon monoxide and hydrogen to give a general measure of air quality. The BH1745 light sensor can tell you the luminance and colour of light, so you could use it to detect unrestful blue light or adjust your lighting's intensity/hue depending on the time of day.

Want to add more sensors to this board? A CO2 sensor breakout (plugged into the Qw/ST connector) would make a nice addition, so you could keep an eye on ventilation levels and cognition impairing carbon dioxide build-up.

Enviro x Pico W Aboard

Our new Enviro (Pico W Aboard) range is designed with environmental monitoring / logging in mind. We wanted to make a range of Pico/RP2040-powered, all-in-one sensor boards that are compact, easy to install in places and straightforward to program. The wireless capability of Raspberry Pi Pico W lets Enviro integrate with other systems - so you could post your data into databases, home automation systems, or online citizen science efforts - the Internet's your lobster!

Because the least fun thing about adding lots of sensors to your environment is figuring out how supply power to everything without tons of trailing wires, they are all designed to work well off battery power.  Each Enviro board has an onboard RTC (Real Time Clock), so that they can periodically wake up from deep sleep, take a reading (and, optionally, connect to wifi) and then go back to sleep - giving you months of untethered battery life.

We've also put together some handy accessory kits to go with our Enviro boards, that include an appropriately sized AA or AAA battery pack, a USB cable and other essentials for each board, so you can get going super quick.

Enviro Features

  • Raspberry Pi Pico W Aboard
    • Dual Arm Cortex M0+ running at up to 133Mhz with 264kB of SRAM
    • 2MB of QSPI flash supporting XiP
    • Powered and programmable by USB micro-B
    • 2.4GHz wireless
  • Deep sleep/wake function using RTC
  • 1 x POKE (user) button
  • Reset button (because we're not monsters)
  • Battery connector (JST-PH connector, 5.5V max voltage)
  • User/activity LED (dimmable via PWM, can only be lit when board is awake)
  • Warn LED (attached to RTC)
  • Qw/ST connector for attaching breakouts
  • Fully assembled
  • No soldering required.
  • Enviro firmware
  • Schematic

Enviro Indoor Features

  • BME688 4-in-1 temperature, pressure, humidity and gas sensor (datasheet)
  • BH1745 light (luminance and colour) sensor (datasheet)

Software

Enviro ships with some super slick provisioning software that makes it really easy to set it up and connect to things, even if it's your first foray into environmental logging/IoT. Power it up and connect to the network called 'Enviro Indoor Setup' with your phone, tablet or other wi-fi enabled device - your Pico W will walk you through the rest!

Connecting Breakouts

The Qw/ST connectors on Enviro boards make it super easy to connect up I2C Qwiic or STEMMA QT breakouts. If your breakout has a QW/ST connector on board, you can plug it straight in with a JST-SH to JST-SH cable. 

Breakout Garden breakouts that don't have a Qw/ST connector can be connected using a JST-SH to JST-SH cable plus a Qw/ST to Breakout Garden adaptor. Want to use multiple breakouts at the same time? Try this adaptor!

Notes

  • Measurements: 69 x 36 x 9.9 mm (L x W x H, approx)
  • Enviro boards can enter a deep sleep mode where the Pico W, on board sensors and sensors connected via Qw/ST are completely powered down. The only thing left running on the board is the RTC which can wake up the board again at a set date and time or on a timer. You can also wake up the board via the POKE button, or by connecting the USB cable. If connected to USB power Enviro will never enter deep sleep, though our software will reset the board every time it takes a reading.  Power consumption when asleep is 20uA.
  • The RTC can also be used to keep track of the time and date (which means we don't need to waste power by making a wireless call to find out the time/date each time we log a sensor reading!)
  • The Warn LED is connected to the RTC, so it can be lit even during deep sleep to notify you of problems. It is limited to three states - on, off, or 1hz blink (it's not possible to control the brightness).
  • Most Enviro boards can be powered by a 2 x AAA battery pack, which fits neatly behind the board. Any battery pack that can supply between 2V and 5.5V will work though - 2 or 3 alkaline AA or AAA cells, 4 rechargeable NiMH cells or a single cell LiPo. If you're using a LiPo, bear in mind there's no battery charging included on Enviro boards, so you'll need a separate LiPo battery charger (like a LiPo Amigo) to be able to charge it.

About Pico W Aboard

Our new Pico W Aboard products come with a built in Raspberry Pi Pico W. This means you get all the advantages of a RP2040 microcontroller - a speedy fast dual-core ARM processor, a dynamic, growing ecosystem and a choice of different programming methods to experiment with. Most excitingly though, Pico W has wireless connectivity, so your Pico/RP2040 devices can communicate with each other, and the internet! 🌍

Wireless is very new to Pico/RP2040 - be aware that things will move fast and change! Software support (wireless examples, tutorials, CircuitPython support etc) will take a little while to catch up. If you're an absolute beginner to Pico/RP2040, you might have a better experience with wireless if you wait until everything is a little more settled.

15 customer reviews

a year ago
The device is very handy and does its job as expected. The free enviro.io plan is a bit limited, but there are easy guides yo setup your mqtt or fluxdb store. It would be nice to be able to reconfigure the parameters (frequency, thresholds, enable/disable watering) without having to plug the device in a computer, but memory is limited so probably not feasible
by Nicola about Enviro Indoor (Pico W Aboard) via REVIEWS.io
a year ago
24 hours in.. 5 stars so far after overcoming a minor battery issue. Initially would not stay connected to WiFi with the batteries provided with the kit. (Router ~ 50 ft from kit). Would stay connected short range to cellphone for configuration, but after initial connection to wifi network, connection would be lost with the next post transmission of data. Replaced batteries and all good....Connection has stayed up for last 18 hours transmitting every 15 minutes. With fresh batteries (and firmware update to V0.0.10) works as advertised to a custom HTTP endpoint on a Raspberry Pi 4 working as a server in the building. Time will tell.....
by Bill about Enviro Indoor (Pico W Aboard) via REVIEWS.io
a year ago
I really wanted to like this product cause it offers what we all want from a home monitoring device. It is configurable, comes with good provisioning help, and is infinitely customizable since it runs python. However, in practice it is ok for a small POC project but not for sustained use, as I learned the hard way. I have lost 2 of these. One was in a stevenson screen outside the house and rusted and I assumed that perhaps it isnt meant to be used like that. But then, another one failed indoors that was in a bathroom. This was on top of a cabinet, so no accidental splashes, and alongside an non-smart humidity sensor which has worked for more than a year. So essentially a humidity meter that cant stand humidity! And this happened fairly quickly, I dont think I've had this specific piece for even a month. And this is on top of the other issues of not being able to measure battery level, batteries running out every few weeks despite using recommended settings, etc. Initially, i assumed the software updates might have been able to iron the issues out, but the longer I try it the more I feel there are some hardware issues and this should isnt packaged and advertised appropriately for its capabilities.
by Basil about Enviro Indoor (Pico W Aboard) via REVIEWS.io
2 years ago
Great little kit, and love the work you've done so that one can provision it just with a smartphone and wifi. My only gripe, mine came with an older version of the firmware loaded, so there were a few bugs. Once flashed with the new version all worked fine.
by Jeremy about Enviro Indoor (Pico W Aboard) via REVIEWS.io
2 years ago
Cool little project board, will be deploying it to monitor temp and humidity to ensure some specific thresholds are not exceeded.
by Jeff about Enviro Indoor (Pico W Aboard) via REVIEWS.io
2 years ago
The problem with the Enviro Indoor is that no matter how lovely and shiny it looks, it is work-in-progress and isn't a finished product. They shouldn't have sold it in this state or they should have put a big disclaimer saying the firmware is "beta" quality and they are still ironing out the bugs, of which there are quite a few. As a good example, the shipping firmware for me was version 0.2 and this firmware doesn't report back the VOC/AQI result from the gas scanner chip, which is bad because I'd say for most people this is the main reason they'd want to get this board! Additionally, the wifi connection drops often and if you leave the board alone for a few hours, you'll come back to see a red blinking LED draining the battery indicating it can't send any data due to an error. New firmware (v0.9) has come out that fixes the missing data and stability issues but then has introduced more issues! According to the release note on Github (https://github.com/pimoroni/enviro/releases/tag/v0.0.9), it was discovered that the battery voltage level pin uses the same pin as the wifi chip (which indicates to me a design fault) so the battery voltage level is inaccurate and they've had to disable it as it was causing these dropped connections too. Additionally with v0.9 when you power the device off USB it will take one initial reading, get stuck because it can't deep sleep then roll over and die... never reporting back anything unless the reset button is pressed or it is powered off. Finally, everything seems to be compounded by bad retry logic which will batch send failed results up to Adafruit IO (that's should be good in theory) however Adafruit then rejects it with a 422 response because it's triggered an API rate limit depending on your plan (I had the free plan) and the device seems to just die with a flashing red light forever more regardless of how much time has gone by. Other users have reported 422 errors due to the RTC clock drifting which equally results in the red light of death. I really want to like this product, the design looks great and it features a lot of sensors. It's clear the firmware has had a lot of time spent on it however I wanted to get a IoT device I could get going with straight away to log the air quality, temperature and humidity in my garage. I'm a hobbyist so I don't have a week to spend debugging half-finished firmware, I just want to hack and get up and running as fast as possible. It's been disappointing because I actually have a wifi router in the garage but nearly every time I plug this in, 12 hours later it will have died with the dreaded red flashing light of doom! It's great if you just want to tinker with some sensors for half an hour but to actually make use of this I need it to be more reliable, which is what I thought I was getting at £42 a pop! The product page makes no reference to this being unfinished, with no time-table for when all the bugs will be fixed (still buggy and it came out 6 months ago). It's just disappointing and I feel they should have managed expectations better if nothing else.
by Anonymous about Enviro Indoor (Pico W Aboard) via REVIEWS.io
2 years ago
Works straight out of the box and it was a matter of minutes to get it connected to my home automation setup, I'm extremely satisfied :)
by lupo about Enviro Indoor (Pico W Aboard) via REVIEWS.io
2 years ago
Easy to set-up using guidelines found on Internet. Manage also go install latest firmware and send data to an cloude influxdb. But I think the temperature are a little to high. It is not that temperature I can feel my self...
by Ivan about Enviro Indoor (Pico W Aboard) via REVIEWS.io
2 years ago
Very useful. Provisioning was flawless and works well with adafruit but I now have it writing to a Matt broker with no issues. Only gotcha so far are the humidity and temp sensors readings as they are a bit low compared to the sensor they are replacing.
by Anonymous about Enviro Indoor (Pico W Aboard) via REVIEWS.io

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