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SRGray

I bought Air Quality sensors for reasons. This is the current reading on my balcony (lemmy.ca)

submitted 2 years ago by lfzs to c/greater_sudbury

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[–] SRGray 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Ouch!

WAQI is currently pulling 196 ug/m3 for Sudbury into my Home Assistant.

Out of curiosity, which AQ sensors did you pick up? A link would be great so I can see if they'd be compatible with HA.

[–] lfzs 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

https://www.airgradient.com/kits/

I integrated it with HA via ESPHome after flashing it with configs I found on: https://github.com/ajfriesen/ESPHome-AirGradient/tree/main

Mine are one Pro (indoors) and one Open Air (balcony).

I set up HA to integrate with InfluxDB and Grafana to read from it to plot nice graphs.

Ping me if you wanna chat about it.

[–] SRGray 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

From what I'm seeing, these all need to be hardwired in, but maybe I'm just not digging far enough.

Is that correct?

[–] lfzs 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What do you mean with 'needs to be hardwired in'?

I just had to put the components in the case and plug the cables. One of the kits just needed the sensors to be attached to the female pins already soldered in the board. It took me less than 10 min to assemble both.

No soldering needed.

[–] SRGray 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The kids doesn't mention any wifi/zigbee/z-wave capabilities, which would mean it would need to be connected to your HA unit with a cord of some sort (it references a USB cable on the page). That's a hardwire connection (as opposed to a wireless connection).

[–] lfzs 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Got it. They have an ESP chip in them, so they have wifi.

One is ESP32-C3 and the other is ESP8266.

But I'm powering them with the included cable, which is pretty decent. You can certainly power it with battery but I have no idea about its power consumption.

[–] SRGray 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Ah. I suspected ESP had wifi buit-in, but I've never used ESP myself.

If the power draw is about the same as a security camera, it could perhaps be plugged into one of the small solar units meant for an external camera.

Now that I know it's wifi, I may just need to get one and see if it'll work with my solar cells. Should be a fun experiment!

Thanks for answering my questions!

[–] lfzs 1 points 2 years ago

No problem. Happy to help!