I recently got a Dust sensor from a company and it says that the voltage out corresponds to the concentration of dust in the air. How can I use the GPIO pins to get the voltage reading?
The voltage is lower than 4 volts as well.
-
2You need to put an ADC between the sensor and your Pi, since the Pi does not have analog inputs or outputs. – Steve Robillard Mar 11 '17 at 17:57
-
How do you do that? – Allan Cao Mar 11 '17 at 18:01
-
Here is the manual for the sensor: waveshare.com/w/upload/0/0a/Dust-Sensor-User-Manual-EN.pdf – Allan Cao Mar 11 '17 at 18:02
-
2You'll need to do a lot more research. Two ADCs that I frequently use are the MCP3008 and ADS1115. You can search the Internet for either one of those, combined with "Raspberry Pi", and optionally with a specific programming language. – stevieb Mar 11 '17 at 18:51
-
I too searched for the same. Now am trying with ADC MCP3008. Hope it will work. or try allaboutcircuits.com/projects/… – Ben Sujin Jun 15 '18 at 13:20
Use an ADC (analogue-digital converter) like the MCP3008. Easy to get readings with Python:
from gpiozero import MCP3008
dust = MCP3008()
while True:
print(dust.voltage)
You can use dust.voltage if you need the voltage itself, or use dust.value to get a normalised value (0-1). See the gpiozero docs and this guide to using ADCs (including wiring).
I found several tutorials online for connecting analog inputs to a Raspberry Pi. I'd recommend the Adafruit site. I noticed that one of the chips they used was about the same price as an small Arduino, which has 5 analog inputs. There are many online tutorials to show you how to communicate between and Arduino and Raspberry Pi.
