That's optional, you can skip the cloud and download the data directly from the device over bluetooth and dump it into graphana or whatever floats your boat.
IMO it’s absurd that you cannot download over your local LAN and have to rig up a Raspberry Pi (or similar) to read via BLE. That turned me off, although I’m still looking for a sensor with radon.
I have an AirThings Wave+ (CO2, VOC, pressure, radon, temp, humidity) that I read from using an esp32 via ble (esphome) to bring the data into Home Assistant. All local, super easy to setup & 'just works'.
I'm sure you could use a Pi to pull in the data manually via ble if you have no other uses for Home Assistant.
Please consider the context of the conversation you’re replying to before getting upset about nothing.
Nobody said anything about having your non-technical mom set it up. The context was using a raspberry pi and ble to pull data from a sensor which heavily implies the person wishing to do it has a decent technical background. What I said is completely reasonable in this context.
Hosting a local server to do data collection isn’t normally something a non-technical person cares about in the slightest to begin with, so it’s pretty irrelevant. Having my devices local and using a hub of sorts to do everything is ideal, to non-technical people it’s a huge hassle. They want cloud enabled easy setup devices.
Er, unbox, pull the battery tab, open the airthings app, click adopt, and away you go. It shows the sensor readings whenever you ask and will notify you of things like humidity too low/high, CO2 being 2 high "Open a window", and the like.
If mom doesn't want to use the free cloud she might need some help, but it's about as simple as it could be for self hosting, not sure how they could make it easier.
Absurd why? Battery powered for a year pretty much rules out wifi, BLE seems pretty reasonable for the use case. The code is open source so you can use whatever you want that is BLE enabled. I have a USB BLE dongle, but plenty of widgets have BLE built in.
Or just buy the more expensive model that talks wifi and plug in a USB-c to power it.
