Suggestions for light sensor

Hi all,

I need advice to choose the type of light sensor for my project, which can accurately measuring the intensity of light and convert it into a lux value. I have been looking for a sensor-based photodiode and get some options:

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10656

https://www.adafruit.com/products/439

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Andy Payne on September 4, 2012 at 5:12am

Hi Yasser,

This is a good question. If you're goal is to measure light intensity (ie. lux), then my vote of the two products you linked would be the Adafruit product. The nice thing about this one is that it comes with a breakout board (as the actual light sensor part for both of these are incredibly small). There's also a great tutorial with code to help you get started.

The sparkfun part is great too, but it's more suited for detecting color. The part you linked would be pretty difficult to actually work unless you had a breakout board, so I would recommend getting this one (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10701) instead of the raw SMT part. There's also a great tutorial over at www.bildr.org (http://bildr.org/2012/01/adjd-s311_arduino/) which explains how to use this part... however, if you're just looking for lux output (and not necessarily by channel... ie. Red, Green, Blue) then I would probably stick with the Adafruit product. Plus, it's slightly cheaper.

Hope this helps,

Andy

Permalink Reply by Yasser Hafizs on September 4, 2012 at 11:12am

Thanks for your explanation Andy, always opened a new knowledge for me.

I need a lot of sensors to control different parts of my project. If I use a Sparkfun part, do I just use single breakout board to operate all of the sensors?

One more question, I have a problem with the new firefly 1.0067 firmata, I can not upload it, it's something wrong? So I still used the old firefly firmata (1.0066), it's still work perfectly.

Best

Permalink Reply by Andy Payne on September 5, 2012 at 2:14pm

Hi Yasser,

You will need a separate breakout board for each sensor.

Also, can you try downloading the latest version of the Arduino IDE (1.0.1 - http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Software) I think the one you're using is version 1.0 and I think there were some changes to the Serial Library in the latest release. Please try that and let me know if it works (as it does on my machine).

-Andy

Permalink Reply by Yasser Hafizs on September 5, 2012 at 2:50pm

It's working!
Thanks Andy

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