Making a dumb air quality sensor smart

IKEA make a very inexpensive (about £10) PM2.5 air quality sensor called Vindriktning. There are only two things wrong with it - it’s annoyingly noisy, and the only output from it is a red/yellow/green LED traffic light of the current air quality, no numerical values and definitely no history or graphs. Let’s try to fix both those problems.

Making it smart

Making it smart is actually easier than it sounds, and all the hard work has already been done, including support for the sensor in ESPHome which is my platform of choice for small sensors to talk to Home Assistant. It just involved soldering 3 wires between the standard Vindriktning board and a Wemos D1 Mini and writing a short config file.

Testing the sensor

I did the smart mod on two units at the same time so I could compare the two together. While I can’t calibrate one against the other, if the sensors in both give similar values in the same circumstances then the measurements are at least repeatable, even if they’re not accurate. To do the comparison, I sat both units next to the kitchen stove while I fried some halloumi and they matched each other wonderfully.

The kitchen wasn’t noticeably smoky, but it was clearly way more than the sensors were intended to handle. The graph shows the values from the sensors peaking far above 1000 µg/m³. I’m not sure if I believe the actual values or not - the US EPA’s highest category for PM2.5 is from 250 to 500 µg/m³ is “Hazardous” if exposed for 24 hours, with “serious risk of respiratory effects in general population” and a study found that Chinese-style cooking can cause a value of PM2.5 of 160 µg/m³ in the kitchen. Perhaps being right next to the stove meant that the samples weren’t representative of the air in the rest of the room, or perhaps these sensors really are only good for red/yellow/green traffic light indicators.

I looked at figures for my town from official monitoring stations and they say the PM2.5 around here is under 10 µg/m³, which matches what the IKEA sensors say when I’m not cooking, so I’m willing to believe that the sensors are at least in the right ballpark.

Making it quiet

Every review of these sensors mentions that they are noisy. They have a fan in them to draw a sample of air through the sensor, and they run the fan on a duty cycle of 20 seconds on and 10 seconds off - so it’s constantly ramping up and down and is infuriatingly noticeable. Many people on the internet have tried undervolting the fan to reduce noise.

The IKEA circuit switches the fan on and off using the negative fan wire, so you can supply the positive fan wire with a lower supply voltage and it will still cycle up and down when taking samples. The 3.3V regulator in the Wemos D1 Mini board I’m using will easily drive the fan, so I connected it there.

The result is almost entirely silent. The fan still spins up and down, and I can hear it if I hold the sensor up to my ear, but it is completely inaudible at arms’ length. But how broken are the sensor values now? Since I have two sensors and have only modified one of them, I can repeat the cooking test and see how the two differ now, and calculate values for a filter in ESPHome to bring the readings back up to where they should be.

But I need not have worried - if the lower voltage does affect the readings at all, it’s by less than 10%, so I don’t need to scale the values up at all.

Smoothing out spurious values

The sensors seem quite prone to what I am assuming are false readings. They can be giving a reading of under 5 µg/m³ for hours, and then suddenly spike to 100 µg/m³ and then drop back to 5 a few seconds later. I am assuming a single large particle got into the sensor and it interpreted it as many small particles. The blog post which I took most of the esphome config from used a sliding_window_moving_average filter in esphome to flatten out this noise, but I found it not to be sufficient. Switching that to a quantile filter improved the noise dramatically.

Is it worth it?

Maybe. For under £15 in parts and a few hours of my time, I now have an air quality sensor pushing data into Home Assistant. This is the first time I’ve looked into air quality and it turns out that my air is pretty clean, at least as far as PM2.5 is concerned. It’s nice to have the data but it’s not actionable for me - I don’t have any air filters which I can operate automatically when the figures get high, and I don’t feel a need to get any. Maybe siting one of the sensors outside would prove useful, but for now the data is just another number in a dashboard.