“The device is very handy and does its job as expected.
The free enviro.io plan is a bit limited, but there are easy guides yo setup your mqtt or fluxdb store.
It would be nice to be able to reconfigure the parameters (frequency, thresholds, enable/disable watering) without having to plug the device in a computer, but memory is limited so probably not feasible”
“24 hours in.. 5 stars so far after overcoming a minor battery issue. Initially would not stay connected to WiFi with the batteries provided with the kit. (Router ~ 50 ft from kit). Would stay connected short range to cellphone for configuration, but after initial connection to wifi network, connection would be lost with the next post transmission of data. Replaced batteries and all good....Connection has stayed up for last 18 hours transmitting every 15 minutes. With fresh batteries (and firmware update to V0.0.10) works as advertised to a custom HTTP endpoint on a Raspberry Pi 4 working as a server in the building. Time will tell.....”
“Great little kit, and love the work you've done so that one can provision it just with a smartphone and wifi. My only gripe, mine came with an older version of the firmware loaded, so there were a few bugs. Once flashed with the new version all worked fine.”
“The problem with the Enviro Indoor is that no matter how lovely and shiny it looks, it is work-in-progress and isn't a finished product. They shouldn't have sold it in this state or they should have put a big disclaimer saying the firmware is "beta" quality and they are still ironing out the bugs, of which there are quite a few. As a good example, the shipping firmware for me was version 0.2 and this firmware doesn't report back the VOC/AQI result from the gas scanner chip, which is bad because I'd say for most people this is the main reason they'd want to get this board! Additionally, the wifi connection drops often and if you leave the board alone for a few hours, you'll come back to see a red blinking LED draining the battery indicating it can't send any data due to an error. New firmware (v0.9) has come out that fixes the missing data and stability issues but then has introduced more issues!
According to the release note on Github (https://github.com/pimoroni/enviro/releases/tag/v0.0.9), it was discovered that the battery voltage level pin uses the same pin as the wifi chip (which indicates to me a design fault) so the battery voltage level is inaccurate and they've had to disable it as it was causing these dropped connections too. Additionally with v0.9 when you power the device off USB it will take one initial reading, get stuck because it can't deep sleep then roll over and die... never reporting back anything unless the reset button is pressed or it is powered off. Finally, everything seems to be compounded by bad retry logic which will batch send failed results up to Adafruit IO (that's should be good in theory) however Adafruit then rejects it with a 422 response because it's triggered an API rate limit depending on your plan (I had the free plan) and the device seems to just die with a flashing red light forever more regardless of how much time has gone by. Other users have reported 422 errors due to the RTC clock drifting which equally results in the red light of death.
I really want to like this product, the design looks great and it features a lot of sensors. It's clear the firmware has had a lot of time spent on it however I wanted to get a IoT device I could get going with straight away to log the air quality, temperature and humidity in my garage. I'm a hobbyist so I don't have a week to spend debugging half-finished firmware, I just want to hack and get up and running as fast as possible. It's been disappointing because I actually have a wifi router in the garage but nearly every time I plug this in, 12 hours later it will have died with the dreaded red flashing light of doom! It's great if you just want to tinker with some sensors for half an hour but to actually make use of this I need it to be more reliable, which is what I thought I was getting at £42 a pop! The product page makes no reference to this being unfinished, with no time-table for when all the bugs will be fixed (still buggy and it came out 6 months ago). It's just disappointing and I feel they should have managed expectations better if nothing else.”
