SparkX Combo issues

Development Boards Arduino
1

First off, I acknowledge that SparkX products have no warranty or support. However, here is my story about the SparkX Combo BME280 / CCS811 air quality board. My wife is in charge of air quality at a large (unnamed) government facility, and I wanted to make her a cool ‘paperweight’ dealing with air quality. I kept things simple - a native 3.3v board (Arduino 101) and combining the Sparkfun example sketches for the BME280 and CSS811. At first, everything seemed to work well - until it started to get warm here in Las Vegas which it tends to do. At approx. 93.8 f the board would ‘lock up’. The BME280 portion worked, but the CSS811 would just stop - the I2C address would still show up, but no data in or out. Then, a week later, the CSS811 portion stopped responding entirely (well, the I2C address could still be scanned.) With some fault testing, I get an immediate ‘heater failure’ on the CSS811 - so no chance of recovery from this I’m afraid.

Has anyone else seen a failure like this on either the SparkX combo board or just a dedicated CSS811? I have separate BME280 and 811 working fine now, but being persistent I ordered another SparkX combo board. I’m pretty sure the 811 (or board) must have had a problem from the start given the odd lock up at 94 degrees, could have been related to the heater element in the 811. It sure would be nice if Sparkfun would step up to the plate on this and at least check it out, but I know the SparkX products are a little different.

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Right now I’ve got a very expensive BME280 board, at least that still works.

John F

2

Yes my combo unit died after a week or so of breadboarding my portable air quality sensor project. I may have damaged it with 5V. The configureCCS811 startup routine currently returns “Error: App not valid” which might mean it needs to be reprogrammed. I dont see how to do that in the libraries provided …I have found in the below notes the outline how to do it by writing over the I2C : see

https://download.ams.com/ENVIRONMENTAL-SENSORS/CCS811

I havnt had time to progress this yet.

I suspect there’s more work to be done in order for hobbyists to use this sensor/pair. My VOC and CO2 outputs didnt seem right, even after the 48hour burn in and only using data after a 10min stabilization delay after poweron. Has potential.