What is the difference between an indoor air quality monitor and an outdoor one?
Can't I just put this one outdoors in an out-of-the-rain-and-sun area and call it an outdoor air quality monitor?
Can't I just put this one outdoors in an out-of-the-rain-and-sun area and call it an outdoor air quality monitor?
These sensors are not as accurate as more expensive professional devices but are good enough to give an idea of the pollution in the air.
From my experience so far, PMS7003 measurements are comparable to official government air quality measurements available for my neighborhood.
Although there is an old joke about their accuracy: "how do you use a cheap pressure sensor to determine altitude? Drop it out the window and count how long it takes to hit the ground."
There are also affordable gas concentration sensors which can be useful for this sort of thing. Some are even marketed as 'air quality sensors' because they exhibit sensitivity to several different types of gases, but they aren't always useful because the output is usually just the sum of the sensor's response to each individual gas. Still, if you want a project to probably depress you in 10 years, get a CO2 sensor like the MH-Z19B and make yourself a datalogger. (Keep in mind that it's a little power-hungry, up to 150mA @5V = 0.75W)
It's also fairly expensive, on the order of $10 rather than $1 last I checked.