Bringing Real-Time Air Quality to Your Dashboard with Node-RED and HibouAir

As smart environments become more prevalent across homes, offices, and educational institutions, the need to understand and act on indoor air quality has never been more important. While automation platforms like Node-RED have made it easier to connect various devices and services, visualizing live air quality data is often overlooked.

That’s where HibouAir comes in—a powerful, plug-and-play air quality monitoring device that can be easily integrated into your Node-RED dashboard. With this integration, you can receive real-time air quality data directly in your browser, enabling informed decisions, automated actions, and healthier indoor environments.

What is Node-RED?

Node-RED is an open-source, flow-based development tool designed for connecting hardware devices, APIs, and services in a visual way. Developed originally by IBM, it allows users to drag and drop nodes, wire them together, and build automation flows—all with minimal coding.

With support for serial communication and BLE workflows, Node-RED is ideal for developers, researchers, and system integrators who want to visualize sensor data or create smart automation flows.

Creating a Real-Time Air Quality Dashboard Using Node-RED and HibouAir

With just a few tools, you can build your own live air quality dashboard using HibouAir and a BLE USB dongle such as BleuIO. The dashboard will show real-time data like CO2, temperature, and humidity, updating automatically as your environment changes.

We’ve created a detailed tutorial on the BleuIO website that shows how to:

• Scan for BLE advertisements from HibouAir
• Decode the advertisement payloads
• Visualize the data using Node-RED’s dashboard features

Once set up, your dashboard will provide a dynamic view of your indoor air quality, refreshed every few seconds.

Live dashboard

Live readings of CO2, temperature, and humidity.

A snapshot of the working Node-RED flow using BleuIO and HibouAir.

Why This Matters

For homeowners, office managers, and educators, maintaining healthy air quality is not just about comfort—it’s about well-being, productivity, and safety. With live CO2 and PM data, you can Trigger alerts when CO₂ levels rise above healthy limits, Monitor temperature and humidity trends, Automate ventilation or purification systems via smart relays, Keep track of long-term air quality for compliance or optimization.

The Node-RED integration makes this possible without requiring any cloud account or complex setup. Everything runs locally, giving you full control over your environment and your data.

Real-Life Use Cases

Smart classrooms can use this setup to ensure students are learning in fresh, safe environments.
Corporate offices can use it to maintain ideal conditions for productivity and energy efficiency.
Researchers and developers can prototype BLE dashboards quickly and test new ideas with minimal hardware.
Home users can build their own DIY monitoring setup to ensure better air quality for their families.

What You Can Do Next

With a working dashboard up and running, you can expand the project in many ways: Add a chart node to track historical data, Trigger mobile notifications or alarms for threshold breaches, Log data locally or send it to a cloud server for further analysis, Export and share your Node-RED flow with your team.

This is just the beginning. HibouAir’s BLE support makes it perfect for local integrations like this—fast, secure, and customizable to your needs.