Corporate Office Environmental Monitoring with Arduino Pro

The quality of the air we breathe has a direct impact on our health. Poor air quality can cause a variety of health issues, including respiratory infections, headaches, and fatigue. It can also aggravate existing conditions such as asthma and allergies. That's why it's so important to monitor the air quality in your office and take steps to improve it if necessary.

In addition, the number of people in an office can have a significant impact on air quality. The more people there are, the greater the risk of contaminant emissions into the air. This is why environmental monitoring is so important in corporate offices; this helps ensure air quality is safe for all workers.

The past few years have added another layer to this challenge: the COVID-19 pandemic has forced many companies to reassess their workplace safety protocols. One of the most important considerations is air quality. Poor air quality can lead to various health problems, including respiratory infections.

Building environmental monitoring refers to the security and privacy practices used to protect workers and office buildings from airborne contaminants. This includes collecting data on air quality, temperature, humidity, and other environmental factors. This data is then used to assess the risk of exposure to hazardous materials and take steps to mitigate or eliminate those risks.

To meet the challenge, we will design an environmental monitoring system based on sensor nodes that monitor each room and send the collected data to a gateway that can either display it locally or push it to a solution cloud where additional calculations can be performed. . Whether at the gateway or in the cloud, alerts can be set based on certain thresholds considered relevant.

Air quality monitoring

To monitor environmental conditions, we chose the Arduino Nicla Sense ME, which is designed to easily analyze motion and the surrounding environment - hence the 'M' and 'E' in the name. It measures rotation, acceleration, pressure, humidity, temperature, air quality and CO2 levels introducing brand new Bosch Sensortec sensors to the market.

The sensor that interests us the most on the Nicla Sense ME is the BME688, the first gas sensor with artificial intelligence (AI) and integrated pressure, humidity and temperature sensors with high linearity and high accuracy. It is housed in a rugged yet compact 3.0 x 3.0 x 0.9 mm³ enclosure and specially developed for mobile and connected applications where size and low power consumption are critical requirements. The gas sensor can detect volatile organic compounds (VOCs), volatile sulfur compounds (VSCs), and other gases such as carbon monoxide and hydrogen in the parts per billion (ppb) range.

The complete technical sheet is available here.

People matter

To monitor the number of people in each room, we chose the Arduino Nicla Vision, which combines a powerful STM32H747AII6 dual-arm Cortex-M7/M4 processor with a 2MP color camera supporting TinyML, as well as a six-axis smart. motion sensor, built-in microphone and distance sensor.

One thing to consider when using cameras is privacy concerns and for good reason! In our case, the cameras are used to run an edge model to gauge the number of people in view and no actual video stream or image leaves the camera. Only the real number makes it both safe and effective.

For this, we chose the Edge Impulse platform where we can easily train and deploy a model that will allow us to detect the number of people in the camera's field of view. After deployment, no internet connectivity is needed for the camera and only the number of people will be relayed to the gateway.

Both the Nicla Vision and the Nicla Sense ME have the same size and PCB layout, the main difference being that one has a camera and the other has an array of sensors. For each, we created a 3D printed enclosure to...