HackSpace magazine issue 51 demonstrates tracking workshop dust using an air particulate sensor.
Dust is one of the more difficult workshop dangers. We don’t just mean little flecks of dead skin that float around and coat old equipment, but tiny fragments of almost anything that float through the air and settle in our lungs. Some dust is well-known to be particularly dangerous – most famously asbestos – but almost all dust is dangerous to some extent.
Small particles aren’t visible to the naked eye, and if they make their way deep into the lungs, they can be difficult for our
bodies to remove.We’ll be using a PMS5003 air quality sensor which is fairly common. It outputs data using the common serial protocol, so you should be able to get it to work with most microcontrollers, and we’re using an Adafruit Metro ESP32-S2 Express, as this works with both WiFi and CircuitPython, making it a great choice for Internet of Things-type devices.
Read more in the latest issue of HackSpace Magazine on pages 66-69, download PDF, buy now, subscribe.
