From environmental monitoring to room occupancy detection and indoor tracking, modern commercial, industrial and residential building management systems demand the fusion of many different sensor technologies. These technologies include – but are not limited to – sensors for measuring:

  • Air quality
  • Ambient light
  • Humidity 
  • Motion detection
  • Noise
  • Temperature
  • Vibration 

Incorporating these sensors into a comprehensive building management system can be a costly and time-consuming process, especially if the system is built around proprietary hardware and software that limits the options available to the developer. It was to address this issue that Sfera Labs developed its Exo Sense family of edge-computing multi-sensor modules built around the open, powerful and affordable Raspberry Pi platforms. 

Ready for immediate deployment in residential, industrial and commercial installations, Exo Sense modules can be employed across a wide variety of environmental monitoring and data gathering, BLE positioning, indoor tracking, rooms management, access control, signaling and alarm reporting applications. And despite their competitive cost, each of these modules incorporates, as standard, sensors for measuring temperature, humidity, air quality (VOC), light, and motion, while a microphone and advanced audio processing provide noise detection. Additional peripheral and custom sensors can easily be connected through communication interfaces to extend the sensing capabilities in areas such as CO2 monitoring, seismic monitoring (earthquake detection) and vibration measurement.

Multi-sensor functionality and compatibility not only eliminates the need to purchase and spend time combining multiple sensors but results in highly integrated, small form factor solutions that can be installed in even the most space-constrained environments. Exo Sense RP, for example, combines its extensive array of sensors with the performance and versatility of the Raspberry Pi RP2040 MCU in a wall-mount enclosure measuring just 80mm x 80mm. 

Basing the sensor modules on the open Raspberry Pi platform makes development and customization much simpler and much more cost-effective when compared with solutions tied to conventional proprietary technologies. Exo Sense modules can be programmed in C/C++ and MicroPython and are supported by several IDEs, including Visual Studio Code and the Arduino IDE. All coding resources, tools, examples and the vast community support available for the 

Raspberry Pi, as well as the open-source libraries and applications developed by Sfera Labs specifically for Exo Sense RP, can be leveraged to easily develop professional solutions.