Adafruit Sensirion SCD-30 – NDIR CO2 Temperature and Humidity Sensor – STEMMA QT / Qwiic @sensirion #MakeItWithSensirion #Sensirion

Take a deep breath in…now slowly breathe out. Mmm isn’t it wonderful? All that air around us, which we bring into our lungs, extracts oxygen from, and then breathe out carbon dioxide. CO2 is essential for life on this planet we call Earth – we and plants take turns using and emitting CO2 in an elegant symbiosis. But it’s important to keep that CO2 balanced – you don’t want too much around, not good for humans and not good for our planet.

The Sensirion SCD-30 is an NDIR sensor, which is a ‘true’ CO2 sensor, that will tell you the CO2 PPM (parts-per-million) composition of ambient air. Unlike the SGP30, this sensor isn’t approximating it from VOC gas concentration – it really is measuring the CO2 concentration! That means it’s a lot bigger and more expensive, but it is the real thing. Perfect for environmental sensing, scientific experiments, air quality and ventilation studies, and more.

Data is read over I2C, so it works very nicely with just about any microcontroller or microcomputer. We’ve written both Arduino and Python/CircuitPython code so you can get started in a jiffy. Another nice element to this sensor is it comes with an SHT31 temperature and humidity sensor already built-in. The sensor is used to compensate the NDIR CO2 sensor, but it’s also readable so you get full environmental data – video.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/4867
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-scd30?view=all
https://www.adafruit.com/?q=Sensirion&sort=BestMatch