Welcome! 

Hello everyone! As I mentioned last post, I had gotten a shipping notice about my kit. It came, so I am now going to do an unboxing post to hopefully show the potential of these sensors.

The Kit

If you remember, I selected the Exploration station kit, which comes with the SensorXplorer demo board, the Color / Ambient light sensor, (VEML3328-SB) and the Proximity / Gesture board, (VCNL4035X01-GES-SB) My original design had the ambient light sensor as a way to regulate the charging of a solar panel, but instead decided to use it in a more fun a creative way, where it uses its color sensor to plat songs. The proximity sensor will add backup sensing to the cart. In my last post I explained that I am using an Arduino to read input from the sensors, so next week we will be looking at interfacing them with the Arduino's Wire library. This post will just be a general demonstration to understand the sensors. Let's jump right in!

Setup

I was able to find a set up guide for the SensorXplorer board, that I ran through to get the board ready. Once all the proper software was installed to interface with the board, I could get raw readings from the color and proximity boards. Here are the readings I got with each color:

The red, green, and blue readings act as I expected them to, with each respective color much higher above the other two. Another interesting thing is the scale the colors levels are in changes, so instead of having a set limit to tell what colors are high and which are low, I will have an algorithm to tell which level is the highest and whether there are any near enough to be counted as high as well.

And here is the proximity sensor reading:

As you can see from the proximity readings, it is not quite linear and the readings get higher the closer I get, not farther as I originally assumed. After some testing I decided the ranges will be changed to 0-30 = Far, 31-80 = medium, 80+ = Close. I also discovered that it still reads properly through a clear plastic, so I now know I can give the sensor some protection from the elements on my golfcart. (The color sensor can read through clear plastic as well)

Thanks for Reading

I hope this post was informative, take a look at my last post if you liked this one, and have a great day!