IKEA Vindriktning Air Quality Sensor Mod Adds Sensors and Indicators

IKEA devices are known to be fairly hackable, and the Vindriktning air quality sensor itself has generated quite a number of hacks, altering the device to include extra sensors and adding Tasmota support to enable local control through MQTT. Recently, Stefan Lochbrunner — while looking for a way to check air quality in his living room — decided to amp up the device’s capabilities, embedding more sensors and lights with a custom PCB and 3D-printed LED mounts and configuring a Grafana display.

The design started by adding an Adafruit CCS811 air quality sensor and MCP9808 temperature sensor, later developing to include an Adafruit BME688 temperature, humidity, pressure, and gas sensor as well as an SGP30 air quality sensor. The board design is based on an ESP8266 and intended to be polished and versatile, including a few GPIOs routed to the board’s edge along with the connections for the Vindriktning, I2C sensors, and WS2812 LEDs.

On the software side, Tasmota is used to publish the sensor readings via MQTT, while they are also stored on a Raspberry Pi. In the configured Grafana dashboard below, individual sensor readings are shown separately, spanning dew point and humidity to ppm air quality readings. As an additional visualization of the data, flows were set up in Node-RED to send color values back to the ESP, according to sensor measurements and thresholds, for both the eCO2 and TVOC readings.

This project builds on a number of other hacks listed on a page of inspirations and references. This is also where the instructions used to set up the software — including the Tasmota as well as MQTT, Node-RED, InfluxDB, and Grafana — are found. Since the Vindriktning color sensors have thresholds that may not be the most reliable for a PM2.5 sensor, the page also lists sources for threshold values used for the color-changing LEDs.