this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2026
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Long story short I'm in the process of building an outdoor air quality, temperature, humidity, pressure, and motion sensor setup for my front porch. One is the PM1006K which is a cheap (10.00 on Amazon) pm2.5 sensor. It's supposedly used in some consumer air filter systems and a review said it worked with ESPHome... well it does after a ton of poking and prodding with a little flogging of the wires.

The link is to the github page where I have the final product posted. I know there are better sensors available but they tend to run more and the really good ones use a laser sensor and burn out over time so it becomes an ongoing (some only last 8000 hours) expense.

This one is a DC01 Infrared PM2.5 Air Quality Sensor. And I'm pairing it with a DHT22 for temperature and humidity, a BMP280 temperature and barometric pressure sensor, an MQ-2 + MQ-7 + MQ-135 for hazardous gasses and smoke, and a BH1750 light sensor, a AM-312 + a HC-SR04 for motion detection. All running on an ESP32-S3 which is also acting as a Bluetooth Low Energy proxy.

All the code will be able to be found at https://github.com/nightshade00013/MuttMutt-ESPHome when it's 100% completed. But being the pm2.5 working correctly was a huge step in the right direction. And the main reason why I am posting this now so others who are interested in building a cheap sensor can get started.

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[–] MuttMutt@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

May as well, lol. When the house is done I should have a decent cash flow positive enough to be able to spend more time diving and traveling.

I'm using wled and just have random things that play and I manually set different ones on certain holidays. Nothing super fancy. I will eventually add more strips and light the whole house... may even attach to my soalar racking with a few strips. I have concrete headstones for Halloween and will be making a couple more but I am not sure if I want to run lights on them. Eventually my front yard will have a couple fruit trees with a pergola to put some on. After that I will probably look at a light show. The house is a semi craftsman style so I'm considering downlighting the side walls with a strip instead of going along the edge of the roof. With a white house it can be any color I want at night.

For Christmas I do have a couple things that are lit up. My other half bought a couple wire lit yard things that I have installed WS2812B fairy lights in and I made a WLED sign that says Merry Christmas in the same fairy lights. At some point I'm going to do a Christmas tree the same and mount it somewhere in the front.