Hello everyone. Today I completed my Summer of Sensors Design Challenge participation on In the Air Tonight category. And what next? What about applying for Summer of Sensors Design Challenge again and make it more challenging? Yes! This is exactly what I want to do. Last week I received my reward from World in Motion Project14 competition and as part of reward (I will write about whole reward in separate blog later) I ordered Vishay VEML3328 colour sensor. And guess what? This sensor is used within Summer of Sensors Design Challenge in category Exploration Station. So I decided that today I will try play with this sensor for a first time and I will try to evaluate it by midnight. Midnight is deadline for this competition. Only few hours remain, so it will be big challenge to write 5 blogs by midnight (in my time zone)!

I am not interested in winning this category. I am realistic and I know that it is impossible to beat challengers who spend two months in less than 6 hours. I just want to test myself to check that I am able to complete evaluation sensor in less than six hours. Also, there is rule that non-sponsored challenger have to use part of the kit. I will use the same sensor but not at evaluation board provided in kit. Instead, I did breakout board for it. For similar reason I will use only VEML3328 because I do not have VCNL4035.

My idea for project is just test sensor, receive data from it and experiment with it. Check that colour detection work and so on.

Blogs will be short because now I have about 4 hours to complete both project and blogs. It would be super challenge to complete it by deadline. But wait… Contest is having Challenge in the name, so everything is ok.

What is VEML3328?

At beginning it is nice to see what the VEML3328. It is colour sensor. Something like advanced single pixel camera. It can return amount reflected of red, green and blue it receives and this can be used for detection of subject near the sensor. I have no previous experiences with this type of sensors (and for this reason I ordered it as part of Project14 reward). I think I will learn in following 4 hours a lot.

Last week after I received reward my VEML3328 looked as follows. It was properly packed in cut tape, but today It looked completely different because I soldered it on the breakout board which I designed in the meantime of waiting for the reward.

Thank you for reading this blog and stay tuned for next blog. In next blog I will describe my breakout board for VEML3328.

Note: Due to timing restrictions, typos are not checked. If you find some, feel free to notice time in comments.

Next blog: VEML3328 Last-Minute Entry: Blog #2 Making Breakout board