BME688 4-in-1 Air Quality Breakout (Gas, Temperature, Pressure, Humidity)

The super-smart BME688 air quality sensor can measure temperature, pressure and humidity precisely. It also has an upgraded, AI-enhanced gas scanner! Use it with the Breakout Garden system with your Raspberry Pi!

Like its predecessor the BME680, this high quality sensor can be used to monitor every aspect of your environment, taking high precision measurements of temperature, pressure and humidity.

Additionally, the BME688 has an updated gas scanner function with extended measurements, which will react to changes in volatile organic compounds (VOCs), volatile sulfur compounds (VSCs) and the presence of carbon monoxide and hydrogen to give a general measure of indoor or outdoor air quality. With Bosch’s software, you can analyse the gas readings further and train the algorithms to make inferences about specific air quality indicators, including the likelihood of bacteria growth and the presence of other organic contaminants.

Want to get an idea of whether there’s adequate ventilation in your bedroom, your workshop, or workplace? Set up a BME688 on a Pi Zero W and have it log sensor readings to a file or post them into your home automation software or a web service like adafruit.io or freeboard.io.

It’s also compatible with the fancy Breakout Garden system, where using breakouts is as easy just popping it into one of the slots and starting to grow your project, create, and code. This breakout is Qw/ST compatible so it can be plugged into a whole range of different microcontrollers and HATs that have Qwiic or STEMMA QT connectors.

View our full Breakout Garden range here!

Features

• Bosch BME688 4-in-1 environmental sensor with Artificial Intelligence (datasheet)
• I2C interface, with address select via ADDR cuttable trace (0x76 or 0x77)
• Qwiic/STEMMA QT connector
• 3.3V or 5V compatible
• Reverse polarity protection (on Breakout Garden connector)
• Raspberry Pi-compatible pinout (pins 1, 3, 5, 7, 9)
• Compatible with Raspberry Pi and Arduino
• Python library
• C library provided by Bosch
• BME688 software
• Schematic

Kit includes

• BME688 breakout
• 1×5 male header
• 1×5 female right angle header

We’ve designed this breakout board so that you can solder on the piece of right-angle female header and pop it straight onto the bottom left 5 pins on your Raspberry Pi’s GPIO header (pins 1, 3, 5, 7, 9). The right-angle header also has the advantage of positioning the breakout away from the Pi’s CPU so as to minimise radiated heat.

Software

As well as the C library provided by Bosch, we’ve updated our BME680 Python library (with a quick and painless one-line-installer) to work with the BME688, making it straightforward to combine it with our other boards (why not use a Blinkt! to visualise air quality in real-time?)

Notes

• In our testing, we’ve found that the sensor requires some burn-in time (at least 20 minutes) and that readings may take a couple of minutes to stabilise after beginning measurements
• The trace on the back of the board marked ADDR can be cut to change the I2C address from the default of 0x76 to 0x77, meaning that you can use up to two sensors on the same Raspberry Pi or Arduino
• The BME280, BME680, BMP280 and BME688 breakouts all share the same I2C addresses, so if you’re using two together then you’ll need to change the I2C address on one of them using the solder bridge or cuttable traces.
• Dimensions: approx 19mm x 19mm x 5mm (L x W x H, including connector)