Hey Kids, Don’t Leave Your Naked Grill Sensor Out Overnight!
Naked hardware and moisture don’t mix! Duh!
Butternut Squash Soup
Naked hardware and moisture don’t mix! Duh!
I’ve been working on an air quality monitoring project using the Plantower PMS5003 particle detector. It’s a cool little device that uses a laser to count particles of various sizes (1.0mm, 2.5mm and 10mm). It won’t tell you what kind of chemicals are in the air but it will give you a good idea of what size and how many particles the sensor is seeing.
tl;dr
The Plantower PMS3003/PMS5003/PMS7003 particle sensors usually come with an 8 wire cable with male plugs on each end. The cable needs a Molex 053261-0871 female connector, which has a 1.25mm pitch “PicoBlade” header. You can find it at Digikey, Mouser, eBay (but don’t, the prices on eBay were ridiculous last time I looked) and even Amazon.
The toughest thing about using it isn’t the software or hardware, it’s mechanical – I had a very difficult time finding a compatible connector. The sensor ships with a short 8 wire cable with two male ends. I ended up just cutting the wires in two and soldering them to a perfboard, but this is a less flexible and more permanent solution than I was happy with.
I was fortunate enough to manage to get an order in for a Raspberry Pi a few weeks back and finally received a unit.
The Raspberry Pi has gotten a lot of press… it’s a tiny, very inexpensive Linux computer. The basic specs are minimal (700MHz ARM processor, 256MB RAM, boots off SD card) – but when you consider that you’re paying roughly $35 for a board, it’s quite impressive.
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