Breathe easy, knowing that you can track and sense the quality of the air around you with this PM2.5 Air Quality Sensor with I2C Interface particulate sensor. Mad Max & Furiosa definitely should have hooked up one of these in their truck while scavenging the dusty desert wilderness of post-apocalyptic Australia. And for those of us not living in an Outback dystopia, this sensor is great for monitoring air quality, in a compact plug-in format.

Best of all, unlike almost all other sensors we've seen that are UART interface, this one is I2C interface, which makes it a great match for single board linux computers like Raspberry Pi, or even plain Arduino UNO's that normally would use software serial.

This is the bare module which is designed to plug into a 2x5 0.05" pitch SMT connector (it looks a lot like a SWD connector but not the same pinout). It comes with one connector that you could use to solder thin wires to if you did not want to make a full PCB.

This sensor uses laser scattering to radiate suspending particles in the air, then collects scattering light to obtain the curve of scattering light change with time. The microprocessor calculates equivalent particle diameter and the number of particles with different diameters per unit volume.

The I2C data stream updates once per second, you'll get:

• PM1.0, PM2.5 and PM10.0 concentration in both standard & environmental units
• Particulate matter per 0.1L air, categorized into 0.3um, 0.5um, 1.0um, 2.5um, 5.0um and 10um size bins

As well as checksum, in binary format. We have libraries for both Arduino and Python/CircuitPython that will read and checksum data, and print it out in human-readable format.

Each order comes with one fully assembled sensor module including one 2x5 10-pin 0.05" pitch header. You will need to power the sensor with 5V and use 3.3V logic I2C to read, don't forget external I2C 10K pull-ups!

If you want the PMSA003I sensor module fully assembled on a STEMMA QT / Qwiic-compatible breakout board, we've got those here.