Awair Element and Hubitat - 2022

Looking for anyone with recent experience using Awair Element and Hubitat.

I'm thinking about buying several as they seem to have the most sensors and they check the most boxes in the Smart Air Quality Monitor Survey I did.

Any caveats/issues to be awair of?

This device has not been tested by our engineers, so a built-in integration is not available.

However, it looks like there were a few community efforts to get this device integrated, but I am not sure of their progress. You may want to chime in the following threads:

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As mentioned by bobbyD, the Awair devices don't have built-in support. There are a few community options, and they work okay. The Hubitat-Air-Connect driver works by polling the external Awair API and requires Internet access (and the Awair servers to be working). The one from DigitalBodyGuard polls the devices directly on the local network and so doesn't depend on external access.

I've actually been working on cleaning up the driver written by DigitalBodyGuard, but haven't published it independently yet. I was trying to get the changes integrated but they seem to have disappeared.

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Hi, I wrote the cloud based integration, it works fine, but I didn't know it's possible to integrate locally, will look into this.

Regarding the device itself, after using for a couple years, the particle sensor always reports high levels, like it is blocked. Also, sometimes it looses wifi connection.
Cheers

Got One device. I'm playng with the driver.
It Is unclear what "Path address" parameter is

it should be set to /air-data/latest

It Is. nonetheless it does not work.
I got the awair ip from the Fing app, so I'm confident It Is true

[SOLVED] I had to enable the Device API inside the mobile app. It Is disabled by default in the Elements model...

Having a hard time getting the awair devices to be created after I've installed the driver code and app code. When I open the app and enter my token, it finds the two elements that I have, but after I complete the steps in the app, the devices do not appear. What am I missing?

Thanks

Anyone help would be appreciated.

@motokochan have you ended up improving the original local-polling drivers from @Digital_BG at all? I am about to take an attempt at getting it into Hubitat w/ the local API route. Just figured I'd ask! Thanks.

I haven't had a lot of time to do work on the driver, but I did just push all my local edits up to GH at GitHub - srvrguy/Hubitat-AwAir: Hubitat Driver for Awair-Element. You can follow the same installation instructions, but just replace my account name in the URL. I hadn't updated that yet as I was hoping the changes would be merged in, but I don't think that'll happen.

There are still some limitations to keep in mind:

  • You need to enable the Local API via the Awair app. This is required for any local access.
  • You'll need to set a static IP for your Aware Element units. Nearly every home router has a way to set an IP reservation. If the IP changes, the driver will fail. This probably won't change until drivers can use mDNS names.
  • There's a calculated AQI measurement, but it's based only on PM2.5 readings and only uses the last 5 readings. I will probably improve this eventually.
  • The driver still has some quirks on units when you "initialize" the driver on the device page.

I got everything setup, thank you!!!

I'm getting a "parsing error" in the log file. I check the log periodically for errors and such. Should I be concerned?

By looking at the code, it appears to be an issue with determining the air quality value by looking at all the individual air quality measurements.

I have two IQair filters and two Awair monitors. Hubitat and your driver allowed me to setup two devices with individual IP addresses locked in by my router.

I have a rule for both IQair filters such that they turn on when the air quality drops below a threshold (setup with a variable).

So far, it has been working a treat!

Thanks for the info. I'll try to look into it soon. I'm currently having some connection issues with my units. They don't seem to like certain WiFi systems.

Glad it's been working good otherwise.

I tried an outrageous experiment. I took a leaf blower and went room to room blasting any dust off the shelves, windows, cabinets, etc.

The Awair air quality number dropped from around 95 to 75.

My IQAir filters kicked on based on my Hubitat rule, and the 75 started to climb back over a couple hours. It's now at 90 :-).

The idea was to kick up all the dust, and have the IQAir's filter it out of the air. I also scheduled the robot vacuum to get anything that settled on the carpet.

Jan-Mar is a terrible time for my allergies (at least I think it is allergies). I'll try anything to stop the sneezing and runny nose LOL.

Over the past couple of HE reboots (new firmware), I noticed a behavior that I thought worth posting.

After a HE reboot, the Awair device has strange negative numbers reported. If you hit "poll", everything goes back to normal.