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Showing posts from July, 2023

Air Quality Monitor

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Sensing air quality by measuring  the concentration of 2.5 μm particulates is a useful and fun thing to do. This project displays the measurement on a microbit, and it will be developed to also use a small LCD module. This is slightly more advanced than my usual microbit projects - it uses JavaScript rather than blocks, and involves some fiddly soldering. The inspiration comes from some fascinating internet chat and articles on how to adapt a low-cost Ikea monitor, the  Vindriktning . This cost £15 at the time of writing, which seems affordable for a school project. The device is a stand-alone small box, that has a simple LED indication to show green (good), yellow (ok), and red (not good). It's powered from a USB-C lead. The website for  Home Assistant  (free software for home automation) has a useful series of posts  on Vindriktning  here . These have focussed on adding a small device to log the air quality measurements. They have generally used an ESP8266 microcontroller which i