Title: I&#x27;ve recently been looking into assembling an indoor air quality monitoring system, and so far have failed to found any solution that would meet the following criteria simultaneously:<p>1. Connected for data logging, but local-first. That is, no mandatory Internet connection to vendor cloud. Ability to point to my own server (in my local network), or at least download a data dump off device every now and then (even if over a wire, as a last resort).<p>2. Not strictly industrial-use. I.e. one that doesn&#x27;t require me to become a large corporation to buy some, and that doesn&#x27;t require some proprietary, expensive, and&#x2F;or old-school industrial protocols to talk to.<p>3. Not DIY at the hardware level. I&#x27;m not that good with a soldering iron, and with small children, I have neither time nor workshop space to solder and assemble anything less trivial than &quot;plug a sensor into an ESP32 and screw both into a box&quot;.<p>(EDIT: shmaybe I can solder a few through-hole components into a PCB, but can&#x27;t do SMD nor make a custom PCB.)<p>4. Quality components. With sensors, I mean measuring what it says on a tin (vs. measuring something else and using a factory-provided lookup table to synthesize approximations), and doing it with reasonable accuracy and precision. If there&#x27;s a calibration step to be done, it should be one that doesn&#x27;t require me to incorporate myself to perform it.<p>I&#x27;ve spent some time looking at available options and past HN threads, and so far I discovered that:<p>- Most products that fit #2 and #3 fail at #1 - they&#x27;re predominantly cloud-connected bullcrap, and going by review, they often fail at #4. Occasionally, I find something that fits #2, #3, and #4, but then it fails at #1 by... providing <i>no</i> data export option altogether - apparently, it&#x27;s enough for the consumer to see traffic lights instead of numbers, or browse the readings from the device control panel.<p>- The DIY stuff I saw (failing #3 to smaller or greater degree) is weak in #4 - in some cases, I recognize the sensors as rather poor and tricky to use right (infamous DHT11 comes to mind), and in all cases, I don&#x27;t know how one would go about calibrating anything.<p>My questions thus are:<p>- Does anyone here have a setup that solves for these four points, and if yes, could you share some details?<p>- How one would go about looking for vendors meeting those criteria, if they exist <i>at all</i>?<p>- In a broader sense, how do you go looking for any IoT-adjacent vendor that meets those criteria? It really seems to me that everyone wants me to install their godawful stupid app to connect to their broken cloud, and there&#x27;s such a flood of those products that reviewers can&#x27;t keep up with quality testing, and hackers can&#x27;t keep up with reversing the proprietary protocols and firmwares.
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