Introducing the environmental air quality project

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This week we started working with the Adafruit BME688 environmental sensor board as part of a larger project to develop an affordable environmental gas sensor. The Adafruit BME688 environmental sensor board is built around the Bosch BME688 which is a 4-in-1 sensor capable of measuring temperature, pressure, humidity & gas. Additionally, using the Bosch BSEC software we can convert the gas reading from a resistance/Ohms value into a more useful Index of Air Quality (IAQ) reading.

Goal

We had a pretty straightforward goal this week which was to connect the BME688 sensor to an Adfruit PyGamer, display the sensor values and record data to a microSD card.

Tools we used in this project

• Adafruit BME866 breakout board. Built around the Bosch BME866 all-in-one environmental sensor
• Adafruit PyGamer
• 4-pin JST PH to JST SH cable
• Software: Arduino IDE. Go to https://www.arduino.cc/en/software to download the IDE for your system

Steps

1) Install support for PyGamer in Arduino IDE (Tools -> Board -> Board Manager)

• Instructions: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-pygamer/using-with-arduino-ide
• Install --> Arduino SAMD Boards (32-bits ARM Cortex-M0+) by Arduino
• Install --> Arduino SAMD Boards by Adafruit

2) Install Bosch BSEC Software Library (Tools -> Manage Libraries)

• Instructions: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-bme680-humidity-temperature-barometic-pressure-voc-gas/bsec-air-quality-library
• Install --> BSEC Software Library by Bosch Sensortec

3) Connect sensor and configure IDE to use PyGamer

• Connect the Adafruit BME688 board to the PyGamer using the 4-pin cable
• In the IDE, got to Tools --> Board --> Adafruit SAMD and select the board Adafruit PyGamer M4 Express (SAMD51)
• In the IDE, go to Tools --> Port --> /dev/ttyACM0 (Adafruit PyGamer M4 Express (SAMD51))

4) Upload IO Rodeo voc_sensor_test firmware

Final step is to display the data on the PyGamer. We wrote some inital test firmware which is available on the IO Rodeo Github here: https://github.com/iorodeo/voc_sensor_test.

The firmware does the following:

• displays the BME688 sensor values on a PyGamer LCD (along with units)
• saves data to a microSD card
• converts temp reading from deg C to deg F
• converts pressure units from Pascals to inHg

Relevant Bookmarks

GitHub - iorodeo/voc_sensor_test: Pygamer firmware for testing the BME688 VOC sensor.

Pygamer firmware for testing the BME688 VOC sensor. - GitHub - iorodeo/voc_sensor_test: Pygamer firmware for testing the BME688 VOC sensor.

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