How to read Airthings Wave Mini Sensor data using Raspberry Pi

Do you own a Wave Mini? Do you like to code in your spare time? Great news! You can now read Wave Mini sensor data using a Raspberry Pi.

Airthings Wave Mini has three key sensors including TVOCs, temperature and humidity. It is the perfect first step into understanding the health and comfort level in every room, or a great addition to an existing air quality system.

Our developers provide a starting point to help you read sensor data from an Airthings Wave Mini using a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). You can see the full script (read_wavemini.py) on GitHub.

Requirements 

The following tables show a compact overview of dependencies for this project.

List of linux/raspberry dependencies

List of third-party Python dependencies

Step one: Set up your Raspberry Pi 

The first step is to setup the Raspberry Pi with Raspbian. An installation guide for Raspbian can be found on the Raspberry Pi website. In short: download the Raspbian image and write it to a micro SD card.

To continue, you need access to the Raspberry Pi using either a monitor and keyboard, or by connecting through WiFi or ethernet from another computer. The latter option does not require an external screen or keyboard and is called “headless” setup. To access a headless setup, you must first activate SSH on the Pi. This can be done by creating a file named ssh in the boot partition of the SD card. Connect to the Pi using SSH from a command line interface (terminal):

$ ssh pi@raspberrypi.local

The default password for the pi user is raspberry.

Step two: turn on the BLE interface 

In the terminal window on your Raspberry Pi, enter the following commands:

pi@raspberrypi:~$ bluetoothctl
[bluetooth]# power on
[bluetooth]# show
[bluetooth]# exit

After issuing the command show, a list of bluetooth settings will be printed to the Raspberry Pi terminal window. Look for Powered: yes.

Step three: install Linux and python packages 

Raspbian images usually come with Python (2 and/or 3) pre-installed. To verify Python installation, enter the following commands in the terminal window:

pi@raspberrypi:~$ python2 --version
pi@raspberrypi:~$ python3 --version

Install Linux packages:

pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev git

If you’re using Python 2, install the following packages:

pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo apt-get install python-pip

pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo pip2 install bluepy==1.3.0

If you’re using Python 3, install the following packages:

pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo apt-get install python3-pip

pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo pip3 install bluepy==1.3.0

Step four: Downloading the script

Downloading using git:

pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo git clone https://github.com/Airthings/wavemini-reader.git

Downloading using get:

pi@raspberrypi:~$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Airthings/wavemini-reader/master/read_wavemini.py

Step Five: Reading sensor data  

The general format for calling the script (read_wavemini.py) is as follows:

pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo python read_wavemini.py SERIAL_NUMBER SAMPLE_PERIOD

After a short delay, the script will print the current sensor values to the Raspberry Pi terminal window. Optionally, you may pipe the readings to a text-file (instead of terminal) using the following format:

pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo python read_wavemini.py SERIAL_NUMBER SAMPLE_PERIOD > somefile.txt

Exit the script using Ctrl+C.

Example output of running the script:

Temperature: 27.33 *C, Humidity: 25.51 %rH, VOC: 48 ppm
Temperature: 27.33 *C, Humidity: 25.51 %rH, VOC: 48 ppm
Temperature: 27.33 *C, Humidity: 25.51 %rH, VOC: 48 ppm
Temperature: 27.33 *C, Humidity: 25.51 %rH, VOC: 48 ppm

Note that the script requires that your device is advertising. If your device is paired/connected to e.g. a phone, you need to turn off Bluetooth on your phone while using the scripts.

Sensor data description