PM1.0 PM2.5 PM10 Detector Module

Winter is coming… Autumn outside of the window, however this post is not about a weather station but PM1.0 PM2.5 PM10 Detector. It is time of cold and in my country unfortunately it means also more pollution form chimneys due to fact that people still put everything to their stoves.

To be aware of quality of the air at home I invested in such module. What is AQi, PM2.5, PM10, and PM1.0 please find more details here and here. In short it is nothing healthy and so small that gets into blood and your body.

Let’s back to the module itself. It has colorful TFT, multi-angle laser scattering detector, usb output to collect data in PC application. It measures every second PM2.5, PM10, PM1.0 and based on them AQI. There is also build in sensor for temperature and humidity. I have compared them with Xiaomi Bluetooth temperature and humidity sensor and indication is almost the same. Temperature is lower for 0.5 ℃ which is nothing in home environment.

It changed also my imagination on what is the biggest source of pollution. I thought that making a bed releases a lot of dust but is it seems to it does not have too much impact on the measurements. If I open a window and it smells smoke it automatically raise a level of PMs and AQI.

On the side there is also switch which changes view to even more accurate and detailed information about air around.

Specifications

• Material: Acrylic Case + Electronic Components
• Size: Approx. 8.5×6.5×3.7cm/ 3.35×2.56×1.46″
• Processor: For ARM 32 Bit Chips
• Font color: Multi Colors
• Screen: 2.8″ TFT (2 different display)
• Resolution Ratio: 320×240
• Power Supply: DC 5V
• Operation Current: 1-2A
• Temperature Measure Range: -20 to 60 ℃
• Accuracy: ±0.1 ℃
• Language Version: English 

PC connection

In the box we may find also USB cable to power module but also connect to PC in order to collect live data. Application has been released for Windows OS however there are comments under product and people put debugging data that may allow collecting data also under Linux or MacOS. I will try to work on that later in order to integrate with OpenHAB and my SmartHome.

Application can be downloaded from here.

First before even try to execute, connect module with USB cable to your PC and show device manager to check which COM port is connected to. You should get CH340 in one of them, similar to this:

Later execute application. One of the issue you can experience is language. By default it shows in Chinese. Let’s change it to english.

You need to change one more thing. It is speed of the connection over serial port. Module is configured to send data using 115200 bauds.

Now you should be able to see real time data and also graphs:

You may also tune your settings and change how frequent data should be polled as well as on the same setting page synchronize time shown on the screen with the one on the computer.

Finally the last useful feature is exporting collected data – historical or current to xls file.

It is a pitty that by default producent released just the Windows version of the app. However as I said there is serial port communication described by community in the comments and I will try to get it done using Raspberry Pi as man in the middle.