DesignSpark’s Environmental Sensor Development Kit (ESDK) is an open source hardware platform designed with activist engineering in mind. The ESDK is based on readily available parts (well, maybe aside from the Rasberry Pi!) and uses some clever design tricks to provide a compact, modular form that can adapt to your next project. As of now, there are three modules available:
- Particulate Matter board
- Total volatile organic compound board
- Carbon dioxide board
I was lucky enough to receive one of the kits for beta testing. The kit comes with everything required to build the ESDK. It only took about an hour to assemble it with the basic tools provided. The 3D printed cases that came with it look great, but I decided to mix up the look a little with some slight changes, so this added some time to the build. There’s a great build guide video that steps you through the process. I mounted my kit to some tool board using the provided DIN rail. Plug it in and connect it to your Wi-Fi network and you’re in business.
The touch screen displays the current values from the sensors and if you touch one of the parameters, the last days values are plotted. This is very handy, but if you want to take a look at the data in more detail DesignSpark have produced their own metrics cloud platform based on Grafana. Here you can customise the dashboard by adding your own panels, thresholds and alarms.
I was particularly interested in the volatile organic compound board, because it would be pretty handy around some of the smelly chemicals i use in my workshop. The VOC board uses a Sensirion SGP40 sensor in combination with temperature and humidity sensors. Sensirion’s gas index algorithm is used to spit out a value on the VOC index that ranges from 1-500. The algorithm learns from the previous 24 hour’s data and indicates whether VOC conditions are better or worse than normal (normal being indicated by a value of 100). I put this to use to test out how nasty a few different 3D printing resins were and the results were a little surprising (see the video below). It’s really is pretty amazing that you can measure VOCs in your own backyard using relatively inexpensive equipment!
The ESDK can be expanded with other sensors, or you could add functionality by using it to control devices. I’m planning on adding some control for ventilation in my workshop. But before I get ahead of myself, I need to install the ventilation first! DesignSpark has plans to add nitrogen dioxide and radiation sensors in the future. The ESDK would be a great learning device in an education setting as it has all the elements to spark different interests.