I’d like to measure the levels of harmful gasses in my living room, I can do this with a VOC sensor (volatile organic compound; will pick up CO2, cigarette smoke, burning candles, etc.).

So, I’m going to wire up an ESP32 with a solid state gas detector, and a VOC sensor!

This one here, a ZP07-v4.0 outputs levels low, mid, high of VOCs in the air around it. This will not tell me what the VOCs are though.

This little beauty will though, and give me “measurable” levels of CO, nitrogen dioxide and ammonia. Sweet.

Now, to wire this all together to an ESP32!

Some coding…

Voila, an air quality sensor for my living room, that reports back to my home automation server every 5s. I’ll start graphing the levels soon, see if I can glean any useful info, how many cigarettes smoked, how “stinky” apartment is ?

Woop! I survived the shitshow that was 2020. Now, what to do?

I know, I’ll extend my home IoT network, add more sensors, relays, LEDs, some well-being monitoring schtuff. Planning to control/monitor with HomeAssistant running on an RPi 4 (MQTT server, and ESPHome server).

For the rest of January I’ll be adding an ESP a day!

First, a simple 12V relay, powered by this cute lil ESP-01s. Relay will power 2 computer case fans, 1 which will pull air through a carbon filter; 1 will cool an RPi cluster.