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.