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SDS011 air quality sensor

For discussion of DIY weather equipment - sensors, accessories, improvements to existing kit etc
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KarlS
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Weather Station: Ecowitt GW1003 / WH32 / WH41
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SDS011 air quality sensor

Post by KarlS »

For the last 6 months I have added pm2.5 and pm10 air quality data to my weather site. I use a cheap SDS011 sensor (under 20$ on eBay or Aliexpress, incl. a serial-2-usb adapter), attached to the same Raspberry PI that runs my Fine Offset weather station. A small Python program reads the data every 10 seconds, computes the 10 minute min/max/avg values and uploads them to the web site.

During the 6 months the device has been running continuously without major problems. I have only two "complains": a) the fan gets really noisy at temperatures below -20°C and b) the data are unreliable in high humidity (fog). While a) might be irrelevant to most Cumulus users, b) might not be.

Has anybody else had experience with this device?
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HansR
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Re: SDS011 air quality sensor

Post by HansR »

Not specifically with this one. But the unreliability of PM sensors in high humidity (and high and low temperatures) are quite well known. They can be calibrated for that but even then the low cost sensors are simply inaccurate at high/low temperatures and high humidity.

I made a post with some articles.
You may find some things of interest there.
Hans

https://meteo-wagenborgen.nl
CMX build 4017+ ● RPi 3B+ ● Raspbian Linux 6.1.21-v7+ armv7l ● dotnet 8.0.3
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KarlS
Posts: 135
Joined: Tue 30 Nov 2010 3:01 pm
Weather Station: Ecowitt GW1003 / WH32 / WH41
Operating System: Buster Lite on Pi4
Location: Bridge Lake, BC, Canada
Contact:

Re: SDS011 air quality sensor

Post by KarlS »

The sensor is so cheap, I actually run two of them. Both of them show the same average readings, with differences only in the 2nd or 3rd decimal digit. I haven't noticed any inaccuracy yet due to high or low temperatures, only high humidity (rain doesn't seem to be a problem, just fog). The data sheet specifies a working temperature of -10°C / +50°C with a max. relative error of 15%. While I will probably never reach +50°C, I'm waiting for the first -30°C of this winter. Hopefully, the unit will still work.

Because of our remote location far off from urban or industrial pollution, the air quality is consistently good. It's only during the wild fire season that the air quality gets bad, at times very bad. During September/October, I could actually see slightly higher PM values, most likely caused by the forest fires in Oregon and California, some 600+km to the south. With the utility program DustSensorViewer you can actually "see" a diesel truck drive by on the road in the small blip of the real time graph.
Phil23
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Re: SDS011 air quality sensor

Post by Phil23 »

At the early stages of playing with a few of these.

Have had a couple of SDS011's for the past year & a few months later bought a couple of Sensirion SPS30's.
The Sensirion's are what I'm more interested in.

Planning on hanging them of ESP32's & having them hopefully present a URL with a JSON containing their data.

By no ways familiar with either the ESP or Arduino world, but have help in that area & programming experience on PIC Micros with a BASIC language.
(Not sure how many know that ESP32's are supported in the Arduino IDE. That was outside my knowledge base).

If anyone here has similar interests, I'm happy to collaborate.

Cheers
:Now: :Today/Yesterday:

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Main Station Davis VP2+ Running Via Win10 Pro.
Secondary Stations, Ecowitt HP2551/GW1000 Via rPi 3 & 4 Running Buster GUI.
:Local Inverell Ecowitt Station: :Remote Ashford Ecowitt Station:
zoomx
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Weather Station: Froggit GW1000
Operating System: Windows-Linux
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Re: SDS011 air quality sensor

Post by zoomx »

Maybe this can be useful
https://sensor.community/en/sensors/airrohr/
It is a project that uses an SDS011 (or other sensors) with an ESP8266.

I build one of them and it is running from months.

The firmware is open source but you can use only the binary.
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