Ikea VINDRIKTNING PM2.5 air quality sensor functionality can be augmented with an ESP8266 WiFi board or module, and open-source firmware adding MQTT, or the popular Tasmosta firmware for more features.
Out of the box, Ikea air quality sensor simply shows green (good), yellow (ok), and red (not good) colors to indicate the level of pollution with PM2.5 levels. But Sören Beye (Hypfer), who also happens to have developed Valetudo firmware for smart vacuum cleaners, has added a Wemos D1 Mini board to his sensor and developed open-source firmware with MQTT support.
You’ll need to open the air quality sensor, and solder three wires between the ESP8266 board and the 5V, GND, and Tx (data) pin from the Ikea VINDRIKTNING mainboard. After flashing the firmware, you still get the original LED indicator plus PM 2.5 air quality data sent over MQTT and WiFi. The update system supports Home Assistant Autodiscovery with WifiManager library handling on-the-fly configuration, and ArduinoOTA enabled future over-the-air firmware updates once the device is fully assembled. It is important not to obstruct the airflow to the internal “Cubic PM1006-like Sensor”, or it may seriously impact the accuracy of the air quality data, so the location of the ESP8266 board or module inside the enclosure is important. This is all explained in detail on the aforelinked firmware projects. You may also want to browse Hypfer Github account, as he’s worked on other “WiFication” projects.
But this does not stop here, as Blakadder noticed Hypfer’s project, and decided to give it a try with an ESP-M3 module plus a breakout board withAMS1117 voltage regulator to convert 5V to 3.3V to power the wireless module. He modified Tasmota firmware, installed it on the module, and configured GPIO pin 5 as the Rx pin to get air quality data from the VINDRIKTNING thingie, and since the enclosure is large enough, he eventually added two more sensors, namely BME680 and iAQ-Core, for temperature, humidity, pressure, dangerous gas detection, CO2, TVOC measurements.
Since the Ikea VINDRIKTNING only sells for $11.99 that makes it an inexpensive wireless environmental monitoring system.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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woo that is excellent !
I am going to do this as well. I bought some BT temp/humidity sensors a while back and tried to buy some of these, but my local IKEA hadn’t been able to get them in stock. I finally got four of them today, so I’ll be moving ahead of this later this month and next month. If you’re interested, I’ll share what I find out.
Thanks for this article as it reminded me to check IKEA’s stock again.
Based on this article, I bought the VINDRIKTNING PM2.5. And … It’s tiny … the height is about the length of my pointing finger.
The good news: it’s shining a green color. So I’m safe. 😉