Connect CCS811 CO2 sensor to Azure IoT Hub


In a previous blog post we had a look at connecting an Adafruit Huzzah (ESP8266) to the Azure IoT Hub. In this post we are going to use a CCS811 CO2 sensor and connect this sensor to our Adafruit Huzzah so we can ultimately send CO2 sensor data to the Azure IoT Hub. One common use case would be monitoring room air quality, and sending out alerts when critical levels are reached. This would make the ultimate air quality sensor for the Azure IoT Hub.

Connecting the CCS811 sensor

We begin by connecting the hardware sensor. The CCS811 has five pins that we need to connect. The following pins are used:

CCS811ESP8266
VDD3V3
GNDGND
SDASDA
SCLSCL
nWAKEDigital pin or GND

As you can see the nWAKE can be configured in two ways. When we use a digital pin, the sleep mode of the CCS811 can be used. But when we connect the nWAKE pin to GND the CCS811 will be in constant on mode. For the sake of testing we will connect this sensor on a breadboard. I have created a Fritzing image so you can see the wiring.

Arduino sketch

Now that we have the sensor connected to our ESP8266. We can create an Arduino sketch in order to send data to the Azure IoT Hub. I have modified the iot-hub-feather-huzzah-client-app-master sample code in order to make it work with the CCS811 sensor. Most of the heavy lifting to make the CO2 sensor work, was already done by Maarten Pennings. He created an excellent Arduino library for this sensor, you can find his library here.

For my sketch to work, you need to the following libraries:

  • AzureIoTHub
  • AzureIoTUtility
  • AzureIoTProtocol_MQTT
  • ArduinoJson
  • CCS811 sensor library
  • Adafruit Unified Sensor

The complete sketch can be found on my Github page here.
In order to use the sketch you need to enter three parameters in app.ino:

  • WIFI SSID
  • WIFI Password
  • Azure IoT Connectionstring as shown in previous article.

Receive CO2 sensor data on the Azure IoT Hub

Now that we have the hardware and software ready. We can verify whether data is being received on the Azure IoT Hub. We use the same commands as we used in our previous Azure IoT blog post. And fair enough CO2 sensor data is being received!

In an upcoming article we will take a look at visualizing these data received using the Azure IoT Hub and PowerBI.

Maarten

Hi, I am Maarten and I am the owner of this weblog. I post on various IT subjects that matter in my life as an IT professional.

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