this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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Strategy to calibrate sensors (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 month ago by cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml to c/embedded_prog@lemmy.ml
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(Cross-posting this across several communities in hopes of getting some discussion.)

I'm currently building some indoor climate sensors for my home. My idea is to have temperature, humidity, noise, light, VOC and CO2 readings at a relatively high frequency reporting to my MQTT server.

I am currently setting up some different temperature sensors, and I want to calibrate them (hopefully just a linear offset) and evaluate them on some metrics, such as sensor-to-sensor consistency and accuracy.

To calibrate and evaluate the accuracy, I would need a source of truth, and ideally I would also be able to cycle it through a range of realistic values for the given metric.

What are your strategies to tackling these things? Do you assume the sensors are already well-calibrated and don't bother with this? Do you have a dedicated reader for any sensor value you would want to calibrate?

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[โ€“] orclev@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't have any experience with this myself, but my first thought is just get a dozen or so sensors (ideally different brands and manual as well) and average them together, then use that as your reference point. Any individual sensor may be off, but on average they should be accurate. Might want to exclude any extreme outliers first though in case you have one or two particularly bad sensors.

It's either that or you acquire a calibration source (may not be applicable depending on the kind of sensor) or pay a lot of money for a lab grade pre-calibrated sensor.

[โ€“] cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah, that sounds sensible. I will need multiple sensors for this project anyway.