The Air we Breathe: Design And Analysis of a Wireless, Integrated CO2 Sensor For Air Quality Monitoring

Abstract

The aim of this project was to build an easy-to-use, end-to-end sensor system for monitoring Carbon Dioxide(CO2) levels in buildings. The ongoing attack on human society by the COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated the need to effectively monitor air quality, and our project provides a means of doing so by monitoring CO2 levels. The system contains both hardware– ESP8266 microcontroller, Sensirion SCD41 CO2 sensor, a battery, and a battery shield– and software components: Arduino, Django, and Blynk. The Sensirion SCD41 sen- sors measured the data. This data was then collected by the ESP8266 microcontroller and transmitted to the online platform(Blynk) for storage. Blynk and the Django-based website provided online user interfaces for viewing and accessing the data. To test the system, the device was deployed in four different student areas on campus. Thereafter, the data was analyzed using MATLAB and Python Jupyter Notebooks. This project demonstrates the use of CO2 sensors to gauge the air quality in living spaces, the insights that may be drawn from the data, and offers recommendations on how the project might be extended. Lastly, the project proposes using Pearson correlation coefficients to estimate the number of CO2 sensors required in a space.