Specialized Digital Sensors

BME680

Gas sensor measuring relative humidity, barometric pressure, ambient temperature and gas (VOC).

The BME680 is the first gas sensor that integrates high-linearity and high-accuracy gas, pressure, humidity and temperature sensors. It is especially developed for battery powered and off-grid sites where size and low power consumption are critical requirements. The BME680 guarantees – depending on the specific operating mode – optimized consumption, long-term stability and high EMC robustness. In order to measure air quality for personal wellbeing the gas sensor within the BME680 can detect a broad range of gases such as volatile organic compounds (VOC).

Possible use cases:

• Battery Hydrogen Gas Sensor
• Propane and Natural Gas Sensor
• Gasoline Gas Sensor
• Personal air quality tracker
• Air quality mapping
• Air quality inside cars & public transport
• Enhanced context awareness
• Indicator of too high / low humidity
• Air quality & well-being indicator
• Weather trends
• Weather Stations

Using the BME 680 with the Flexs Q5 is very simple and allows you to remotely monitor weather conditions as-well as volatile gases at your remote repeater sites or off-grid SCADA applications.

Common uses by our customers include.

• Oil Gas Telemetry
• Generator Fuel Leakage (Propane/LPG, Gasoline, Diesel etc)
• Battery hydrogen buildup
• Fuel cell exhaust monitoring

Some of the most dangerous of the VOC’s that can be monitored with BME680 include:

1. Benzene  (commonly found in cigarettes, paint, and gasoline and is classified as a human carcinogen by the CDC)
2. Formaldehyde (found in many glues, resins, foams, plywood, and cigarettes. It has been linked to brain cancer, leukemia and is one of the top 10 allergens)
3. Styrene  (Sweet smelling neurotoxin and carcinogen found in many plastics, with high concentration levels in styrofoam)
4. Hydrogen  (No smell, produced during charging and discharging of various battery types)

Flexs Q5 Interface Details

To connect the BME280 / BME680 to the Flexs Q5 please observe the following

The IC’s themselves are very small and typically we recommend using a breakout board that can give you more space to solder wires to the IC.

The wires should be connected as follows from the BMEx80 to the Flexs Q5 expansion port, one common method is cutting a RJ45 connector in half and soldering the exposed wires to the terminals of the breakout board for the BMEx80

An example of this is seen below for the following breakout board available from amazon

After the sensor is connected to the expansion port on the Q5 you can access the measurements from the onboard scripting, see the following reference example.

/*
This example demonstrates accessing the bme280 / bme680 sensor
*/

let readBME = ffi('int readBMEx80(int)'); // import readBME function
let getBME = ffi('double getBMEx80(char*)'); // import getBME function

// binding the loop to the run() function allows the Flexs Q5 to stop the script during configuration updates,prevents unexpected behaviour
while(run()){

  let uptime = getUptime();
  let status = readBME(680);
  
  print('');
  print('Uptime: ',uptime,'seconds');
  
  print('Pressure:',getBME('pressure')/100,'hPA');
  print('Humidty:',getBME('humidty'),'%');
  print('Temperature:',getBME('temperature'),'°');
  print('Gas:',getBME('gas'),'°'); // Only available on the BME680
  
  setFeed(0,getBME('pressure')/100); // hPA
  setFeed(1,getBME('humidty'));
  setFeed(2,getBME('temp'));
  setFeed(3,getBME('gas'));
  
  waitMS(1000); // wait 1 second
}

FlexSCADA is now manufacturing the module pictured below, if you would like to order please contact us as it is not listed on our web store yet.  P/N FS-BME680