Many features are common to all versions of Enviro - these provide the base functionality of deep sleep, user interaction, powering the board, and attaching accessories.
It's a good idea to familiarise yourself with where the buttons and indicators are before you start setting up your board:
- POKE button: wakes the board from sleep to take an immediate reading
- ACTIVITY LED (white): pulses gently when the board is awake
- WARNING LED (red): blinks if an error occurs (e.g. wireless connection is down)
- Qw/ST connector: a convenient way to add extra sensors
- Sensors: the collection of sensors that the board gathers data from (these vary depending on board type)
- RESET button: resets the board
- Battery connector: compatible with many battery holders and cells
- USB connector: for accessing readings files and logs from your computer
When you receive your Enviro board it will come preloaded with our software but will not be configured yet. You need to go through the provisioning process to tell it how to connect to your wireless network, when to take readings, and optionally where to upload them.
Follow these instructions to get your Enviro board configured and running:
Plug in your battery or USB cable and press the POKE button on the front of the board to wake it up. The ACTIVITY LED will turn on and then after about a second will start to pulse to show that it is working.
If you haven't already configured this board then it will automatically switch into provisioning (setup) mode - you can tell this has happened if the ACTIVITY LED starts to blink rapidly.
From your phone, tablet, or computer go into settings and view the available wireless networks - there will be a new network visible called "Enviro [Model] Setup" (e.g. "Enviro Indoor Setup"). Connect to this network.
It may take a moment but the setup process should automatically pop up with an introduction screen showing the details of the board you're provisioning.
Click Ready? Let's go! ➔ to start configuring your device.
To make managing multiple Enviro boards easier it's a good idea to give each board a sensible nickname so that you can easily identify and filter the readings it generates when uploaded to one of the endpoints we support.
The nickname can be anything you want but may only consist of lowercase letters (a-z), numbers (0-9), and the hyphen (-) symbol. Try to choose a name that identifies the purpose of this Enviro board (for example "main-bedroom", or "weather-station").
Click Networking ➔ to continue.
Enviro needs a network connection to upload your readings and synchronise its onboard clock.
A list of nearby wireless networks will be shown.
Your network not showing? Click Try scanning again to refresh the list or move closer to your network router.
Select your network and enter your wireless password.
If, in the future, your board cannot see the wireless network when it needs to set its clock or upload data then it will blink the WARN LED to indicate that there is a problem.
Click Logging ➔ to continue.
When it comes to choosing how often to take readings it can be tempting to think "more data is better!" but that will, of course, impact on the length of time your batteries last.
In between taking and uploading readings Enviro spends most of its time in a deep sleep which consumes very little power - it can stay in this state for years on just a couple of AA batteries!
Each time Enviro has to wake up to take a reading it will consume some of the available battery power. By selecting a longer time between readings you will substantially increase the length of time the batteries will last.
For most Enviro boards we recommend taking readings every fifteen minutes. This strikes a good balance between regular data points and a long (think months) battery life.
The exception to the rule is Enviro Urban. Because it has to run a small fan to draw air across the particulate sensor it is a lot more power hungry than the other modules. We'd recommend only taking readings every hour or every three hours.
Your Enviro board will store the readings it takes locally and then upload a bunch of them all at once - this is much more power efficient than uploading every reading when it is taken.
Being connected to a wireless network consumes a lot of power so we want to avoid doing that as much as possible. There is some fixed overhead in starting up the wireless functionality so if we can just do that once for multiple readings it's much more efficient.
The amount of power consumed when connected to a wireless network increases as the signal strength decreases so you may find, for example, that an Enviro installed outside seems to consume it's battery faster than one placed near the your network router indoors.
We recommend only uploading every five readings.
Click Uploads ➔ to continue.
Once Enviro is taking readings you'll probably want it to upload them to somewhere that you can view and analyse them. We support a number of destinations for your data:
- Adafruit IO: A platform designed by our friends at Adafruit to store and display your data.
- MQTT: The most commonly used messaging protocol for the Internet of Things (IoT).
- InfluxDB: The Time Series Data Platform where developers build IoT, analytics, and cloud applications.
- Custom HTTP endpoint: We'll make a request to your supplied URL with all of the data included.
Alternatively if you don't want to upload your readings you can choose to have them saved locally.
Click We're done! ➔ to continue.
That's it, we're ready to gather some readings! Place your Enviro in the location where you want it to do its work, hook up power, and perhaps give POKE a quick poke so that it can take its first reading - you should see the ACTIVITY LED light up briefly while it works.
After Enviro has taken enough readings to trigger an upload you'll start to see data appear in the service you selected.
Encountered a problem? Check out our troubleshooting guide!