This is the original idea of this project, some revision are available in the news section
The Idea
My idea was to build an Arduino Based Air Pollution & Dust Sensor to analyze the Air Quality and Pollution of my environment measuring the particulate concentration PM10 with a low cost approach.
My original idea was to use Arduino/Genuino UNO because i’ve already programmed it and Shinyei PPD42NS dust sensor.
The Air Pollution Sensor
The Shinyei PPD42NS uses a LED and a Receiver to check how much the air is “dirty”. This is called “Light scattered principle“.
Data Storage
To collect the data i connected my Arduino with an ethernet shield to a cloud service ( in this case I’m using Thingspeak ) but if you want to collect those data locally you can store values on a microSD card, or send those data to a tablet or smartphones with some Bluetooth module like HC-05.
The ESP8266 WiFi microcontroller
When i started the project i’ve used an Arduino UNO with the ethernet shield but what i’ve actually used is an Adafruit Huzzah ESP8266 because it has built in WiFi and i only need to have the power supply cable to make it work, no ethernet cable.
This board is like the Arduino MKR1000 ( less spec but also 1/3 of the price… and also the MKR1000 was not available when i started my project )
Now i recommend a WEMOS D1 Mini or NODEMCU board with ESP8266 microcontroller.
The ESP8266 can be used with Arduino IDE with add on Libraries.
For more info of how to make it go to the Project Page of my Air Pollution analyzer.
To check the LIVE data of my Air Pollution Dust Sensor go to the Live Feed Page.