Monitor the C02 in a Room (not my product)

amazon.com

5 points·andrewljohnson··5 comments

This is spammy and $239 is stupidly expensive for a co2 monitor. You can get them under $100 all-up. An NDIR sensor component all by itself is $60 from Adafruit which is a hobbyist electronics place that I like but which tends to be on the expensive side. By that, I mean that the $100 retail units are doing fine in terms of markups. You can also estimate CO2 using a much less expensive ($10) VOC (volatile organic compound) sensor.

Anyway I'm planning to DIY a monitor using the Adafruit module, so it will also be able to log to a raspberry pi and that sort of thing. I decided that approach would have more flexibility than buying a complete unit.

Just know that VOC sensors are not very reliable in general and eCO2 is completely unreliable. You can't go wrong with NDIR but $60 sounds quite excessive when you can get a senseair S8 for $10-12 on taobao.

Thanks, I wasn't familiar with the Senseair S8. I had ordered the Adafruit one after checking Seeedstudio and finding that the ones there were almost as expensive. The Adafruit one is on a breakout board with a JST connector for their Stemma QT system (similar to Grove and Qwiic) so you can plug it into a cpu board without soldering.

I see on Aliexpress, there are a bunch of vendors selling the Senseair S8 for around $26, but other vendors are selling as low as $16 and some others over $35. I wonder whether the very low priced ones are fake or anything like that.

Oh well, the solderless connector will make experimentation easier. If I build more of these I'll get some of the Senseair modules.

What makes it spammy?

I got a bunch of airthings .. they seem fancy and are cheaper than this when on sale.

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