As we continue building toward more robust accelerated workflows and self-driving laboratories, integrating environmental monitoring into experimental infrastructure is becoming increasingly important. Factors such as temperature, humidity, pressure, and gas concentration can materially affect the outcome and reproducibility of experiments, particularly in sensitive or long-duration runs.
While we experiment and develop a working example utilizing BME680 sensors (Gas, Humidity, Pressure, Temperature sensor) with a Rasperberry Pi Zero 2W, with the goal of creating a modular environmental monitoring unit. This unit can either operate independently or integrate directly into our existing PiCam setup. The modular approach makes this viable in a wide range of applications.
GitHub discussion and current implementation progress: Issue #324
We would love to hear any experiences that you may have on this topic. Please feel free to share your experiences, suggestions, or existing setups. We’re especially interested in hearing how others have handled environmental monitoring in the context of scalable or distributed experimental systems.