A wireless environmental monitoring board to keep track of inside conditions in your home, office or other habitat. Onboard sensors can measure temperature, humidity, pressure, gas and light.
The top of the range BME688 sensor on Enviro Indoor can measure temperature/humidity/pressure with a high degree of precision, and the gas scanner will react to changes in volatile organic compounds (VOCs), volatile sulfur compounds (VSCs) and the presence of carbon monoxide and hydrogen to give a general measure of air quality. The BH1745 light sensor can tell you the luminance and colour of light, so you could use it to detect unrestful blue light or adjust your lighting's intensity/hue depending on the time of day.
Enviro x Pico W Aboard
Our new Enviro (Pico W Aboard) range is designed with environmental monitoring / logging in mind. We wanted to make a range of Pico/RP2040-powered, all-in-one sensor boards that are compact, easy to install in places and straightforward to program. The wireless capability of Raspberry Pi Pico W lets Enviro integrate with other systems - so you could post your data into databases, home automation systems, or online citizen science efforts - the Internet's your lobster!
Because the least fun thing about adding lots of sensors to your environment is figuring out how supply power to everything without tons of trailing wires, they are all designed to work well off battery power. Each Enviro board has an onboard RTC (Real Time Clock), so that they can periodically wake up from deep sleep, take a reading (and, optionally, connect to wifi) and then go back to sleep - giving you months of untethered battery life.
Enviro Features
- Raspberry Pi Pico W Aboard
- Dual Arm Cortex M0+ running at up to 133Mhz with 264kB of SRAM
- 2MB of QSPI flash supporting XiP
- Powered and programmable by USB micro-B
- 2.4GHz wireless
- Deep sleep/wake function using RTC
- 1 x POKE (user) button
- Reset button (because we're not monsters)
- Battery connector (JST-PH connector, 5.5V max voltage)
- User/activity LED (dimmable via PWM, can only be lit when board is awake)
- Warn LED (attached to RTC)
- Qw/ST connector for attaching breakouts
- Fully assembled
- No soldering required.
- Enviro firmware
- Schematic
Enviro Indoor Features
- BME688 4-in-1 temperature, pressure, humidity and gas sensor (datasheet)
- BH1745 light (luminance and colour) sensor (datasheet)
Software
Enviro ships with some super slick provisioning software that makes it really easy to set it up and connect to things, even if it's your first foray into environmental logging/IoT. Power it up and connect to the network called 'Enviro Indoor Setup' with your phone, tablet or other wi-fi enabled device - your Pico W will walk you through the rest!
Connecting Breakouts
The Qw/ST connectors on Enviro boards make it super easy to connect up I2C Qwiic or STEMMA QT breakouts. If your breakout has a QW/ST connector on board, you can plug it straight in with a JST-SH to JST-SH cable.
Breakout Garden breakouts that don't have a Qw/ST connector can be connected using a JST-SH to JST-SH cable plus a Qw/ST to Breakout Garden adaptor.
- List of breakouts currently compatible with C++/MicroPython build.
Notes
- Measurements: 69 x 36 x 9.9 mm (L x W x H, approx)
- Enviro boards can enter a deep sleep mode where the Pico W, on board sensors and sensors connected via Qw/ST are completely powered down. The only thing left running on the board is the RTC which can wake up the board again at a set date and time or on a timer. You can also wake up the board via the POKE button, or by connecting the USB cable (the board will never sleep if connected to USB power).
- The RTC can also be used to keep track of the time and date (which means we don't need to waste power by making a wireless call to find out the time/date each time we log a sensor reading!)
- The Warn LED is connected to the RTC, so it can be lit even during deep sleep to notify you of problems. It is limited to three states - on, off, or 1hz blink (it's not possible to control the brightness).
- Most Enviro boards can be powered by a 2 x AAA battery pack, which fits neatly behind the board. Any battery pack that can supply between 2V and 5.5V will work though - 2 or 3 alkaline AA or AAA cells, 4 rechargeable NiMH cells or a single cell LiPo. If you're using a LiPo, bear in mind there's no battery charging included on Enviro boards, so you'll need a separate LiPo battery charger (like a LiPo Amigo) to be able to charge it.