LESSON 15: Arduino Color Sensor and RGB LED

[matthewcharles]

I'd like to add a general "thank you" for the quality and thoroughness of your lessons. Yours is the best series I've found for digging into Arduino and C++.

[zaharouni]

You have the best way to teach the other...Thank you very much Mr Paul

[hariprasadkv]

Hello Sir! :)

I am currently doing my masters in product design and my background is mechanical engineer. I was always fascinated with guys who code, play with lot of wires and do lot of cool stuff! I had heard a lot of arduino board but i never tried myself! Then it so happened that for my course work i wanted to design a product which helps a visually challenged person to identify color. So i finally bought the arduino starter kit! I didnot know where to start from but the basic exercises in arduino site was really useful to kick start. I do know basic C++ so understanding the logic wasnt difficult. Then i bought TCS230 color sensor and literally searched the internet inside out to get help for the wiring and coding! That's when i ran into this video! The way you have put up the whole lecture covering the connection, coding and the basics on how the color sensor works is just amazing! I tried the same with sensor i have and it worked, but with a few glitches! But the credit goes for you.. a big Thank You! :) I am following all your tutorials now.

The glitch i have is that my sensor never shows high for green..so i able to read red and blue only..
Also doesnt work well in day light ( the readings are the same 255 for R G and B) and it works well when its dark (no green) ! That too once i applied black tapes around the sensor leds to block light.The sensor i bought doesn't have the black casing your sensor has. Any suggestions :)

[HFRKS]

Mr. McWorter I think the video Lessons you give are probably the best I have seen. Going through the steps in detail and showing the mistakes are FANTASTIC. Please keep up the great work. If you are looking for additional Lesson topics "Automation" is big and like you did with Fusion 360 add 3D Printing into the lesson for the sensor cases. Just love your work!!!

[jameshyde]

This was a tough lesson to get through but it taught me a lot about the IF command, I am also dyslexic and completely understand why you can't see the spelling mistakes, I made exactly the same mistakes. keep up the good work Paul.

[TheBebes]

Amazing work! I've been programming for a while an I still find ur teaching methods helpful!

[lanterrefanterre]

Thank you so much, Mr. McWhorter. These tutorials are the best!! You really made me laugh when the mistake with 'rColorStrength' was made (36:00). I thought it was because rColorStrength was declared as an integer, while the outcome of pulseWidth divided by 400 will almost always be a real number/float. But because of this all, now I know it is possible to use the outcome as an integer. It will just leave out everything after the decimal point

[larrym]

You're a terrific teacher sir! Loving these lessons.

[fatimaaurangzeb]

you're the best teacher! love you!

[ekhalaiva]

I think u get more blue coz of the ambient light. In case u read ur color sensor value in dark place, u wud reduce a lot of noises. But actually what I was looking for in YouTube. Im new to adriuno. This s so so much useful. Heart thanks for this really.

[nadiazameni]

Love the debugging and reassessing process

[McGavel]

Cool point about "unsigned int" to hold numbers larger than about 32, 000. When I was playing with the LED experiments I noticed that if I put in 60, 000 ms (1 minute) on the LED it messed up and came back with a negative (signed) number. Also cool stuff about the pulseIn(pin, LOW) stuff. I don't have a color sensor but needed to know about that for the ultrasonic sensor episode. Thanks again for the cool info & projects.

[saptangshumanna]

Things for me are getting cooler and amazing from this tutorial. I am very excited about the further lessons. You are the best teacher I have ever seen Paul. Thanx for your

[cheungpaul]

Paul, you are the man !! That's a great video. I learnt a lot from this video. Thank you for your hardworking.

[YourLifeWasting]

amazon has stopped selling this item is there a different type of sensor model that would work?

[ventin]

Hi Sir, great effort there but i feel that i have to point out some mistakes you have made. In return, you can also correct my misunderstandings.
1. The problems start at around 14th min. Analog-read as far as i know, the range is from 0-1023, ie, 10bit. So where did this number 102400 come from?
2. From what i know, arduino is a 8 bit micro-controller. It probably combine 2 8bit data to form a 16bit data. So 2^16 gives 65536 for unsigned int and 32768 for signed int. Basically it is divided by 2. So how did this 4.29 billion came about? 32bit. So i dont think it is right to say signed int is of 16bit and when unsigned int will be of 32bit.
3. Because of the above errors, your formulas for the colour strength is wrong too. For analog-write, the range is 0-255 which is 8 bit. So a simple way to convert 10bit to 8bit is to divide by 4. Alternatively you can use the map function.
4. So there is no need to use if statements to make artificial colours, which are the colours of your cards. I wonder what colour the LED will be if you have a white, brown or black card? I doubt the LED will produce the same colour as your RGB will never be (255, 255, 255) or (0, 0, 0).

I wait to be corrected...

[KaramAlAzmeh]

lessons are great, thanks for spending the time to make all these videos. but man the cough is driving me nuts!!!!

[saikrishnagarlapati]

For the sensor to generate the pulse of that duration for each color, don't we need to wait for 102400 microseconds after the pulseIn(outpin, LOW) statement so that arduino can complete reading the duration of the pulse LOW? How can it instantly know what width is the pulse going to be? Please reply. Thank you

[sashamuller]

these videos deserve more views and likes

[hoboken]

I can not find the virtuabotix sensor anywhere. Amazon does not have it and they don't know when or if they will have a restock on this item. Does anybody know where to find this sensor? Thanks...