Do You Know Your Air Quality?

Air Quality is crucial for living and strongly influences human and animal well-being; however, we do not have any senses to directly detect whether air quality is good or bad. We only indirectly feel the consequences of bad air by getting a headache or getting sick. Modern electronic sensors can help us by providing reliable data about the air quality around us.

For our health, we need to know when it is a good time to open the window and let some fresh air into the room and when it is better to keep the windows closed due to poor air quality. High humidity may indicate an environment ripe for mold growth or simply be counterproductive to home laundry drying efforts. Even in refrigerators, knowing the air quality inside is beneficial, so you can quickly identify what is starting to spoil and remove it before contaminating other items in the refrigerator thereby preventing food waste. Renesas offers a multi-purpose air quality sensor solution (Figure 1) to address the above scenarios and more. With this solution, you can evaluate Renesas’ air quality sensors quickly and easily using your smartphone as a GUI. This solution also includes sensors for temperature, relative humidity and ambient light as well as an integrated Li-ion battery, Qi wireless charging, a water-protected housing for outdoor use and Bluetooth 5 to communicate to a smartphone or tablet. Renesas provides the App free of charge on Google Play or the Apple App Store.

The multi-purpose air quality sensor solution is available for evaluation with three sensor types (Figure 2):

• Outdoor air quality (OAQ) sensor solution: Y-EU045-GREENPUCK-1
• Indoor air quality (IAQ) sensor solution: Y-EU045-BLUEPUCK-1
• Refrigerator sensor solution: Y-EU045-YELLOWPUCK-1

With these solutions, Renesas provides a cost-effective Bluetooth-enabled multi-purpose air quality sensor solution including complete hardware and software assistance to accelerate your development.