Temp and Humidity Sensor airflow

[3d-gussner]

To get good temperature and especially good humidity readings it would be beneficial to have some "airflow" vents in the cases.

[that1guy]

@3d-gussner Thanks for initiating this conversation. This is an important topic, and I’ll make sure to include it in our public documentation as well.

To address the current state of the product, I’ll start by pointing out the obvious: the current product is designed as a development kit. 😊 We were aware that the placement of the temperature, humidity, lux, and mmWave sensors wasn’t ideal when enclosed, but we included them intentionally for development purposes.

That said, we have a clear internal strategy to tackle this product design challenge, and I’d like to share it here. Soon, we’ll be introducing a new PCB board we’re calling “the SHOE”. This SHOE board will connect to the bottom of the HAT’s expansion ports and offer several key improvements:

1. Speaker Integration: The SHOE will allow us to securely attach the mini-speaker enclosure to the bottom of the HAT.
2. Optimized Speaker Placement: It will relocate the speaker connection into the speaker chamber for improved functionality.
3. Enhanced Sensor Placement: Sensors will be moved down into the speaker chamber, where they can “breathe fresh air” and be properly oriented (particularly for the mmWave sensors).
4. PoE Connectivity: The SHOE will also provide a PoE (Power over Ethernet) connection.

In essence, the SHOE board will eliminate the need to manage thermals inside the HAT enclosure and enable us to capture accurate readings from the external environment. It turns the Dev Kit boards into the actual mini-speaker product. :)