I have had this indoor air quality monitor since June 2020 but I didn’t write anything about it because the company had informed all backers that a firmware update was coming in August and then in September and I really wanted to include in my review.

I backed the product because the company claimed that Wynd 1st Edition or Wynd Halo will come with two features that I couldn’t miss. The first one is called Air ID which combining raw sensor data with contextual data from the cloud and tells you if the air has pollen, forest fire smoke, or smog from the nearby industrial plant. The second feature is an inhouse PM sesnor.

Today 5/10/2020 the firmware is in version 1.0_233 and it is still without the Air ID feature. Sometimes you need to be patient for the firmware update to arrive.

Features

• RGB Ring LED Light
• LCD Display
• Temperature Sensor
• Humidity Sensor
• VOC Sensor with eCO2 equivalent
• Noise Sensor
• PM1/2.5/4/10 Sensor
• Ambient Light Sensor
• USB-C Power Input 5V DC
• WiFi 802.11 b/g/n @ 2.4 GHz
• Battery 4.44Wh

Design

The monitor and its accessories come in a nice package, not that it is important to me as I always care to receive a package that is easy to recycle and made by sustainable material. They could have designed it a bit smaller to reduce footprint.

The AQ monitor is small and round, and it can stand up on its own as it is bottom heavy. It has a ring LED light system that alerts you when the AQ is poor or good and a small, round LCD display in the middle where you can see the AQ Score or pollutants individually. You can also navigate inside the menu with the help of three buttons (up/left/right).

Also, it comes with an extra wall mount that allows you to connect the USB-C cable on the bottom of the mount in order to attach it to the wall. The wall mount is hollow inside, it has just a male to a female USB-C connector.

Hardware

The display is low resolution, and I dislike LCD displays as the emitted light distracts me. During the Kickstarter campaign, they have promised an e-ink display but they delivered an LCD display.

The LED ring light is nice with a uniform light and color palette, but you can’t dim them, they are always in full brightness except when you turn on Night mode and the LED and LCD turn off.

The battery can keep the device on for a few hours. I usually have the device plugged on the computer, and when I turn off the computer at night, Halo is dead in the morning after about ~6 hours. The LED ring and LCD draw a lot of power.

The PM sensor is made inhouse, and it uses a blue laser light similar to Blu-Ray lasers, which has a finer wavelength — to measure particles as small as 0.1 microns.

The PM module occupies a big part of the monitor, and I have high hopes regarding the accuracy, I hope it won’t disappoint me. I will review the PM sensor in a different article.

The VOC sensor is so small that soon we will see this kind of sensors in smartphones and other wearable devices. It uses the SGP30 by Sensirion, which is a digital multi-pixel gas sensor designed for easy integration into air purifier, demand-controlled ventilation, and IoT applications. The sensor gives an equivalent eCO2 concentration.

Finally, the Light and Noise sensor can measure how comfortable is a room, but they don’t give any specific guidelines for an office or a bedroom apart from graphs. The LED ring and LCD light influence the light sensor because when I placed the device in complete darkness it still measured around 250 lux.

App

The app is nice but a bit hard to use, allow me to elaborate on that. When you launch the app it takes various seconds to connect to the cloud in order to obtain the data from the device. Then, apart from the AQ score which I don’t know how it is calculated, if I want to find the actual measurements, I have to dig deep. There are too few options regarding the customization of the light ring and display as you can only turn both on or off at the same time.

There is an option to export your measurements in a .csv file if you are an advanced user.

Conclusion

All in all, I would describe the device as cute, don’t get me wrong but during the Kickstarter campaign, we were promised a more robust device. I wish there was a more sophisticated night mode with a schedule or the light sensor responsible for the brightness functions of the display/LED. With the exception of the Air ID (still not available), the competition is huge right now, so you need to offer a mature product if you want to stand out. Sure, over time they can fix and upgrade many things, but right now I have the device sitting in its box.