Project14 | Winners Announcement: Photonics: Lasering In On the Science of Light!

tariq.ahmad — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 20:43:27 GMT

Current Revision posted to Documents by tariq.ahmad on 4/27/2020 8:43:27 PM

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"Thus, the photons which constitute a ray of light behave like intelligent human beings: out of all possible curves they always select the one which will take them most quickly to their goal." - Max Planck, (1858-1947) was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.

Congratulations to aspork42 for WWCS - World's Worst Color Sensor - Project 14 Photonics Challenge You are the winner of a $200 Shopping Cart and earn the Grand Prize Trophy Badge!

Congratulations to kk99 for Simple light flicker meter, milosrasic98 for Ski Lamp, and Jan Cumps for PiFace, Raspberry, LabVIEW and LEDs! You are the First Place winners of the $100 Shopping Cart and earn First Place Trophies!

The Photonics competition gave you an opportunity to do projects around lasers, LEDs, phototransistors, LiDARs, TOF cameras, and more! Photonics is the science of light. It is derived from the Greek word "phos" which means light. It emerged as a field in 1960 with the invention of the laser and although the term was coined earlier, it came into common use in the 1980s with the adoption of fiber-optic cable by telecommunications companies, making the digital age we live in possible. Amongst the things that photonics has made possible are high-speed internet, laser tattoo removal, LASIK eye surgery, and infrared goggles. Your project can involve anything that uses optoelectronic components to source, detect, and control light. This includes any applications that study how photoelectric or photovoltaic effect is used photodiodes (such as solar cells), phototransistors, photomultipliers optoisolators, and integrated optical circuit (IOC) elements; photoconductivity used in photoresistors, photoconductive camera tubes, and charge-coupled imaging devices; stimulated emission used in injection laser diodes and quantum cascade lasers; lossev effect or radiative recombination used in: light-emitting diodes (LED) and OLEDs; photoemissivity used in a photoemissive camera tube; and applications related to optocoupler and optical fiber communications.

Without further Ado here are your winners.......

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The Winners

The Grand Prize

WWCS - World's Worst Color Sensor - Project 14 Photonics Challenge by aspork42 :

Community Member Scoring:

Grand Prize: 10 points, First Place: 1 point Total Points: 11 Points

aspork42 has had an idea for a super basic color sensor for. along time. He's not talking about fancy-schmancy color sensors, but rather something more basic... much much more basic... The concept here is to use a humble RGB LED and a photoresistor (aka "light dependent resistor" LDR). The thought is that if you can control the color of the light, then you know what spectrum is available at the sensor. This is the opposite of how most imagers work. The standard color image sensor has multiple pixels, each with a band-pass filter relative to roughly "red", "green", and "blue", and the light source contains spread-spectrum light (aka "white"). His plan was to sequentially turn on just one color light at a time, then read the analog value produced by the LDR through a voltage divider circuit. He'll average 1000 readings, then scale them to a normalized 0-255 to represent 8-bit RGB color. He's using an Arduino to control it. This isn't meant to be highly accurate, but there could be some applications for it. One that comes to mind (potentially) is a kids game where they place a colored block into a toy, and the toy can tell them what color it is. This changes out a multi-dolor sensor with dirt-cheap jellybean parts and works good enough to identify 10 colors. For the actual sensor module hardware, he devised a simple holder for the LED and LDR. I hold the LED at +10° from vertical, and the sensor at +30°. This keeps the spectral reflections from the light going away from the sensor as to not blind it.

WWCS - World's Worst Color Sensor

"This was a very clever project. While the electronics were relatively simple, the photonics aspects of this project were well considered and well executed." - Community Member Judge

"Worlds Worst Color Sensor, Great explanation and experiment." - Community Member Judge

Project14 | Winners Announcement: Photonics: Lasering In On the Science of Light!

Project14 | Winners Announcement: Photonics: Lasering In On the Science of Light!

The Grand Prize

WWCS - World's Worst Color Sensor - Project 14 Photonics Challenge by aspork42 :

First Place Winners:

PiFace, Raspberry, LabVIEW and LEDs by Jan Cumps:

Ski Lamp by milosrasic98:

Photonics: Wireless Communication with Infrared by fmilburn

Arduino MSGEQ7 Light Organ - high power LED banks for your backyard party by robogary:

Candle in the wind by redcharly

Color Classification on ESP32Cam by ankur608 :

In the comments below:

Be sure to Congratulate the Winners and Keep Being Awesome!

Project14 | Winners Announcement: Photonics: Lasering In On the Science of Light!

The Grand Prize

WWCS - World's Worst Color Sensor - Project 14 Photonics Challenge by aspork42 :

First Place Winners:

PiFace, Raspberry, LabVIEW and LEDs by Jan Cumps:

Ski Lamp by milosrasic98:

Photonics: Wireless Communication with Infrared by fmilburn

Arduino MSGEQ7 Light Organ - high power LED banks for your backyard party by robogary:

Candle in the wind by redcharly

Color Classification on ESP32Cam by ankur608 :

In the comments below:

Be sure to Congratulate the Winners and Keep Being Awesome!