Introducing the environmental air quality project

Joanne Long -

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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.

IAQ Index from Bosch BME866 manual (Table 6)

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

Steps

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

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

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
PyGamer displaying data from Adafruit BME688 board
💡
Next Steps! We will be adding a GPS board and start logging data next! Stay tuned for updates in next weeks newsletter.

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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