This is a quick review of the Canāree. An indoor air quality monitor that you can carry around thanks to its compact size.
Specifications
- 7-Bin Optical Particle Counter Sensor (PM1.0/PM2.5/PM10)
- Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC)
- Temperature Sensor
- Humidity Sensor
- Air Pressure Sensor
- USB-A
- WiFi Module
- RGB LED AQ Indicator
You have two choices when it comes to how to operate the device. You can either connect it to your computer or you can connect it to a USB-A power adopter/power bank and operate it anywhere in the house or outside with or without the internet as the RGB LED Indicator will change colors based on the pollution around you.
By connecting the monitor to your computer you have local access and storage of the measurements in your computer drive. This is very handy for the experts that want to make comparisons or analyze the data with advanced tools. With your computer and the special software that you can download from the server of the company you can set up the WiFi module to your local WiFi router or mobile hotspot, making it truly portable.
Once the device is connected to the internet, you can access the data from the web Dashboard https://sensei.pierasystems.com/. Unfortunately, the address of your device doesn’t stay fixed, so you need to search for your device each time.
Dashboard & Software (Win/macOS)
The software for Windows and macOS features the same interface with the web Dashboard offering a uniform experience to the users. There are a plethora of widgets and graphs and even an eCO2 equivalent widget that comes from the VOC sensor.
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Canāree vs RESET Monitor
Conclusion
I think it is a nice little air quality monitor that could potentially help people see the air they breathe but it needs some reefing as the web platform sometimes doesn’t work very well. Furthermore, it needs a smartphone app. Finally, the particulate matter sensor has earned the ISO 21501-4:2018 certification of calibration for a light scattering optical particle counter (OPC), which is used to measure the size distribution and particle number concentration of particles suspended in clean rooms.
See The Air 
Thank you Sotirios very much for this review. I see the strengths and weaknesses of this yet another portable AQ monitor. If they improve the dashboard and add a phone app to it, then this monitor can become really nice. I actually would like to ask you what you think of the smoke detector. How does it work? It only reports an event of smoke detection or does it also record the PM2,5 levels associated to it? How does it recognize the smoke compared to PM’s coming from other sources? I ask this because it is the first time that I see an AQ Monitor that attempts to distinguish between smoke PM and other kind of PM. It is a feature that I really would like to see more developed in the future, because wood smoke pollution is surely one of the future (and present) problems that we will see increasing instead of decreasing. If we will be able to distinguish wood smoke PM from other PM, then we will know how much pollution in our cities will be actually due to wood burning, which is something that personally really concerns me very much. We will be able to finally prove, with numbers in our hands, how much this new fashion – similar to the Diesel gate – of wood burning will do harm to us. And we will be able to use the data to push for a ban of wood burning more effectively.
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Hi Andrea,
Thank you for your comment.
The smoke feature works with the help of an algorithm. So when the sensor detectes a certain pattern it informs the user about the presence of smoke. So basically it makes a assumption.
It constantly measure the particle count number and concentration so you can look up what was the concentration during the smoke event.
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Thanks Sotirios for the reply. What if the smoke event lasts for a whole night, for example, when a city like here in Athens lights up thousands of fireplaces together and the air after 19:00 PM becomes saturated with wood smoke for more than 12 hours? How does it record it? Just as a single event or it tells you also the time length of the smoke spike? Thanks again!
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I think it can only detect cigarette smoke. It doesn’t work in your case scenario.
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if the data is not uploaded for future retrieval (with gps location) it is not so useful. important to plot over time / geography i would think.
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Well, it reflects only your personal exposure regardless your location
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