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Review Pimoroni Enviro Indoor Review: Sense and Sensor-Abilities

Buyer beware. DO NOT BUY THIS BOARD FOR VOC.

So disappointed with this board and this article. I bought the board after reading this article. Did you even try the board? If you did, you would know that the out of the box configuration gives you no VOC data. While the chip included can sample data, making use of this data requires you to take data samples and train an algorithm.

1) I am not a data scientist.
2)I do not know what chemicals are in my home to even train the algorithm against
3)I have found zero resources online providing pre-trained algorithms.


This is a sample of data actually provided by the board in its default configuration.
{"readings": {"pressure": 988.33, "temperature": 27.86, "color_temperature": 3204, "humidity": 36.11, "luminance": 75}, "nickname": "enviro-main", "timestamp": "2022-09-04 00:55:03"}

Don't take my word for it. Here is a completely unanswered issue listed on their GitHub page.
https://github.com/pimoroni/enviro/issues/34

I am totally willing to eat my words and admit I am wrong if you can prove me wrong. In fact I would welcome it, because I would love to use the VOC feature. Yes I have seen Bosch videos on training an AI model. Yes it could be done. Yes training the models on the surface seems simple enough. But I don't have high concentration samples of deadly, dangerous, and concerning compounds to train models. Not to mention training an efficient and usable model is a whole different level. Then you have to write a bunch of code around the model to analyze samples.
 
seems like Pi in the sky then. I’ve often wondered about these things thank you for sharing