Abstract

Deteriorating air quality is of great concernaround the world. Recently, citizen scientists, researchers, andmany others have used low-cost devices such as the ShinyeiPPD42NS dust sensor to measure particulate matter pollutionin both developed and under-developed countries. However,few articles exist specifically on the features and performance ofthese sensors. Some have shown mixed results in terms ofprecision, accuracy, and repeatability, especially for portableapplications. Frequently, users assemble the electronics and thesensors applying simple guidelines, using electric schematics,and coding extraneous algorithms to get questionable data.There is a need to better understand how it works exactly, itslimitations and the effect of the program used to interpret theoutputs of this sensor. This article provides a short electronicanalysis of the Shinyei PPD42NS dust sensor and shows that theinternal sensor electronic design (filters and detection stage) aswell as the used data processing algorithm, limit its precisionand accuracy by generating nonlinearities and biases. Theseissues avoid some applications like moving ones and imply thatthe algorithm used to process the sensor signals must be clearlypresented in future articles.