BME280 Breakout - Temperature, Pressure, Humidity Sensor

by Pimoroni

A really nice environmental sensor that's ideal for indoor monitoring of temperature, pressure, and humidity, or even outdoors in a suitable enclosure. It's Raspberry Pi and Arduino-compatible.

We use this sensor on our Enviro+ environmental monitoring board, but it's such a nice sensor that we thought we'd pop it onto a breakout! The BME280 is a great sensor for monitoring conditions around your home. If you're an iOS user, then there's a Homebridge plugin for the BME280 to let you use the sensor for home automation and monitoring.

This breakout is compatible with our fancy Breakout Garden system, where using breakouts is as easy just popping it into one of the six slots and starting to grow your project, create, and code. BME280 breakouts manufactured after April 2022 are also Qw/ST compatible so you can use them with a whole host of different microcontrollers and HATs with Qwiic or STEMMA QT connectors.

Features

  • Bosch BME280 temperature, pressure, humidity sensor (datasheet)
  • I2C interface, with address select via cuttable ADDR trace (0x76 or 0x77)
  • Qwiic/STEMMA QT connector
  • 3.3V or 5V compatible
  • Reverse polarity protection (on Breakout Garden connector)
  • Raspberry Pi-compatible pinout (pins 1, 3, 5, 7, 9)
  • Compatible with Arduino
  • Compatible with Raspberry Pi (Python library)
  • Compatible with Raspberry Pi Pico (C++/MicroPython libraries)
  • Schematic

Kit includes

  • BME280 breakout
  • 1x5 male header
  • 1x5 female right angle header

We've designed this breakout board so that you can solder on the piece of right angle female header and pop it straight onto the bottom left 5 pins on your Raspberry Pi's GPIO header (pins 1, 3, 5, 7, 9). The right angle header also has the advantage of positioning the breakout away from the Pi's CPU so as to minimise radiated heat.

Software

We've put together a Python library for using the BME280 sensor with a Raspberry Pi, with handy functions to read all of the values, and a few nice little examples.

You can also use this breakout with Raspberry Pi Pico and other RP2040 boards, using C++ or Pirate brand MicroPython or CircuitPython.

Notes

  • In our testing, we've found that the sensor requires some burn-in time (at least 20 minutes) and that readings may take a couple of minutes to stabilise after beginning measurements
  • The trace on the back (marked ADDR) can be cut to change the I2C address from the default of 0x76 to 0x77, meaning that you can use up to two sensors on the same Raspberry Pi or Arduino.
  • The BME280, BME68X, and BMP280 breakouts all share the same I2C addresses, so if you're using two together then you'll need to change the I2C address on one of them using the cuttable trace.
  • Dimensions: 19x19x4.7mm (LxWxH, including connectors)

64 customer reviews

a month ago
Works great. I enabled I2Con the Pi, plugged the BME280 into the breakout garden I purchased at the same time, installed the necessary pyton library using the provided script, and opened one of the example python scripts provided. Bingo; I now have a humidity and pressure sensor running in my kitchen, and as it's on my wifi, I can vnc in from my phone at any time to check the readings. I did initially have the temperature sensor running too, but as it's so close to the pi, which is running at 40+ c, the readout is skewed, so I turned it off. But that's not aproblem with the sensor hardware.
by justin about BME280 Breakout - Temperature, Pressure, Humidity Sensor via REVIEWS.io
9 months ago
I'm learning micro python so at first I had problems to have it reading data, but after a few tries it worked. I noticed that the first sensor read has the pressure and temperature incorrect and it must be discharged. The second read give the data correctly.
by Diego about BME280 Breakout - Temperature, Pressure, Humidity Sensor via REVIEWS.io
a year ago
A really neat and easy to use sensor package. Shouldnt take more than an hour to familiarise yourself with it as the library for it is pretty robust and easy to use. Added it to a project of mine (circuit python) and it works just as expected. I really like it!
by Sony about BME280 Breakout - Temperature, Pressure, Humidity Sensor via REVIEWS.io

2 user photos