And so it begins, the “N.I.E.S.” project!

For some time now, I want to know a bit more about the air and comfort quality in my house. Also, as it is subject more spoken of these days, I want to know more about the subject. At first it was more about air quality, but as I recently moved to a new house I also wanted to see if I can measure comfort in my home.

I already measured things like temperature and humidity before, but I want to know more. Partly because others around me started to ask me questions like ‘Have you been breathing the same air as me?’ and most famously ‘What the hell have you been smoking?’, but that is a different story…

And so, a new project is born…
Dubbed “N.I.E.S.”, stands for “NodeMCU Indoor Environment Sensor”.

In the end my goal would be to have a working sensor in place in my living room that measures some important environment factors related to my health and well-being with an indicator of some sort that warns me to ventilate or take other actions. It also should be ecstatically pleasing but I guess that is something that will probably be kicked down the road once or twice during the project.

Ow, and it should work together with my home domotica platform, currently Domoticz.

Ow again, i really want to use a NodeMCU for this project. Not only because this leads to a really, really cool project name (‘nies’ is a Dutch word for sneezing and a common first name for a female in my country) but also because I like the filthy-cheap board from China with the ESP8266 SOC slapped on it. It’s in reach for everybody and it supports ESPEasy out of the box, what more do we want!

I hope to keep the project under the € 100,– if possible…
(Men can have dreams right?)

So with a bit of groundwork I chopped the project up into a few different phases:

  1. Introduction
  2. What is air quality and comfort?
  3. What are the main risks of poor indoor air quality?
  4. What to measure for and how to interpret the results, based on the main risks?
  5. What do other product on the market offer and for what price?
  6. Settings the rules for N.I.E.S.
  7. Theoretical concept, drawings and kitlist
  8. Proof of Concept
  9. First results
  10. Making it available for everybody…