Adafruit ENS160 Fault

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mattvila
 
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Adafruit ENS160 Fault

Post by mattvila »

Greetings: I just purchased and received the Adafruit ENS160 MOx sensor yesterday. It includes four MOx sensors onboard. The board operates ok except that one sensor (sensors are, Hot Plate (HP), HP0, HP1, HP2, and HP3). HP0, 2, and 3 all exhibit high value resistances, as they should, and respond to changing VOCs in the air. However, HP1 has not responded since first powered up, and sets idle at 1 ohm (the others are in the 10,000 ohms or more range. I suspect the sensor (HP1) is faulty. I would like a refund, or preferably, a replacement.

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: Adafruit ENS160 Fault

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

That sounds like good diagnostic information.

Just to confirm, when did you get the board?

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mattvila
 
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Re: Adafruit ENS160 Fault

Post by mattvila »

Received the device on the 4th or 5th of Feb-23. I plan on buying six more for a research project I am starting. This first purchase was to check out the ENS160s general operation.

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: Adafruit ENS160 Fault

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

Thanks.

Send a note containing a link to this page and your order number to [email protected]. The folks there will get you a replacement.

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mattvila
 
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Re: Adafruit ENS160 Fault

Post by mattvila »

Greetings:

I ordered 6 additional sensors, all are behaving as described earlier in this forum thread. The software I am using is the example software supplied by Adafruit at Github (run on a Arduino Nano). Aside from the apparent 2nd sensor (HP1) not operating correctly and giving values of 1ohm (should be more like 50,000ohms), the example sketches that include temperature and humidity readout for sensor compensation are giving bogus values for %RH at 784%, and temperatures (ambient) 384 degrees C. I had hoped this was just an issue with the evaluation sensor I was testing out. I would like to return all 6 sensors for a refund.

The manufacture suggests that at least one of the four sensor onboard is to detect oxidized gasses. It did occur to me that its possible that the HP1 sensor starts out low (ohms) and goes high in the presence of increasing oxidized gasses. I could live without temp and %RH correction if we can clear up sensor element HP1's nominal readout. It is hard to imagine that these sensor all have the same fault. That said, if we can not clear this up shortly, I would prefer to return the devices.

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mattvila
 
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Re: Adafruit ENS160 Fault

Post by mattvila »

Further re-reading at learn.adafruit.com, Adafruit ENS160 MOX Gas Sensor resulted in two new data points.
1) the sketch example in the document and at Github, for temp and %RH compensation, calls for an ENS210 library, but lack clarity makes it seem as a device onboard the ENS160. Checking at the ScioSense site, I find it is a separate device, sensor, for temperature and relative humidity. It is not board-mounted, like the ENS160, and not available in that form. So the Adafruit documentation should be edited and/or clarify this point. Your competitors at Sparkfun have written code for their ENS160 device to take in temperature and relative humidity from any third party sensor set. However, their code does not let you see all four sensors, just the tVOC, eCO2, and IAQ numbers. 2) also while reviewing learn.adafruit.com, Adafruit ENS160 MOX Gas Sensor, I noted a sketch serial monitor output example, with HP0, 2, and 3 with high resistance values (<10,000ohms), and HP1 at 10ohms. If this is truly their standard starting point, and HP1 goes, presumably, up in the presence of Oxidized gasses I am good to go. Can you please verify this for me.

Best regards - Matt

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adafruit_support_carter
 
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Re: Adafruit ENS160 Fault

Post by adafruit_support_carter »

There are a couple of examples in the library that are expecting a separate ENS210 sensor to also be connected :
* ens160_dev_shield.ino
* ens160envdata.ino
These were added by Sciosense. The Adafruit library is just a fork of their library. We could remove these two examples from the Adafruit fork so it's not confusing.

The Adafruit Learn guide for the Adafruit ENS160 breakout has you run the ens160basic_std sketch:
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-ens ... de-3127780
which only needs the ENS160.

The raw resistance values can be difficult to interpret directly. Those are fed into algorithms that come up with the general gas parameters of interest - eCO2, AQI, TVOC. However, when running the ens160basic_std example sketch, the values should be generally as seen in the Learn Guide example:
https://learn.adafruit.com/assets/115371

Can you paste here the output you are seeing when running the same example sketch.

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adafruit2
 
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Re: Adafruit ENS160 Fault

Post by adafruit2 »

we really only perform the process of placing the ENS160 on a breakout board and wrap the scioscience library to make it Arduino/Python compatible. we have no insight into the sensor itself, how it is constructed or how it is supposed to respond to various voltages: you'll need to open a ticket with scioscience for that!

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