Designing three tiers of battery-powered air quality monitors
Client: Rovary
Industry: Consumer Goods / Smart Home
Service: Hardware Design, Electronics Engineering, Embedded Software, Cloud Platform, App Development
Rovary set out to bring air quality monitoring into homes and buildings under their own brand, complete with custom hardware, a cloud platform, app, and dashboard. Hence, they trusted SPINNOV to design three distinct devices across a Bronze, Silver, and Gold product line, each offering a different level of sensing capability, all engineered to run on battery for up to 18 months without intervention.
Client & Goal
Air quality affects how people feel, sleep, and work, but most people have no visibility into the environment they spend the majority of their time in. Rovary set out to change that with a line of consumer and commercial air quality monitors that would give users real data about their indoor environment, accessible through a dedicated app and dashboard.
The brief was specific: design three devices at different price and capability points, connect them all to Rovary's own cloud infrastructure, and ensure each device could run on battery for at least 18 months.
Challenge
Designing for 18 months of battery life is a significant engineering constraint, especially when the Gold tier device monitors eight separate environmental parameters simultaneously. Every hardware decision, sensor selection, microcontroller choice, sampling frequency, wireless communication strategy, had a direct impact on power consumption. Getting the sensing right and keeping the battery alive required careful optimisation at every layer of the design.
Designing three distinct hardware variants at the same time added further complexity. Each tier needed its own PCB and sensor configuration, while sharing enough of the underlying architecture to keep the firmware, cloud integration, and app consistent across the range. The cloud platform and dashboard also had to be built from scratch to Rovary's own specification, handling device management, data ingestion, and user-facing reporting across all three device types.
SPINNOV’s Solution
Three cloud-connected air quality monitors:
Bronze device: hardware and firmware monitoring CO₂, temperature, and humidity
Silver device: hardware and firmware adding VOC and air pressure sensing
Gold device: hardware and firmware covering CO₂, temperature, humidity, VOC, air pressure, particulate matter, sound, and light
