Ambient Light Sensor With Arduino

Made by anas / Environmental Sensing / Kids & Family / Lights / Sensors / Weather

About the project

We need to sense intensity of light in many of our IoT/home automation projects. Here I explain a simple implementation of ambient sensor.

Project info

Difficulty: Easy

Platforms: Arduino, SparkFun

Estimated time: 3 hours

License: GNU General Public License, version 3 or later (GPL3+)

Items used in this project

Hardware components

	Arduino Pro Mini Starter Kit - 3.3V/8MHz	x 1
	SparkFun Ambient Light Sens Breakout	x 1
	Battery Holder - 4xAA Square	x 1
	Alkaline AA battery 4 pack	x 1

Software apps and online services

Arduino IDE

Story

TEMT6000 ambient light sensor is just another analog sensor.It is compatible with micro-controllers which supports analog data input. This sensor is working like a transistor. As light falling on sensor increases the analog output(SIGNAL) will increase.

If the light is very low then the SIG will be also very low as light increases the SIG will also goes high.

We can use TEMT6000 ambient light sensor from spark fun electronics in various applications that includes ambient light sensing. Like if you want to control your bulb according to ambient light then TEMT6000 ambient light sensor is best choice over simple LDRs. This one is more reliable that LDRs.

TEMT6000 is a silicon NPN epitaxial planar photo transistor. The device is sensitive to the visible spectrum. TEMT6000 is used as ambient light sensor for display back light dimming in mobile phones, Notebook computers, cameras etc.

The below circuit and code is for demonstrating basic working of TEMT6000 Ambient light sensor. Here we are using Arduino Pro Mini as our microcontroller. You can use either a battery or FTDI+USB for powering the board. Anyway if we want to see the data on serial monitor we need to use FTDI and USB. In the below code I am just reading the data and printing it into percentage of Ambient light. And arduino inbuilt LED will ON if the analog value from the sensor goes beyond certain value.

CONNECTION

ARDUINO PRO MINI SENSOR

VCC VCC

GND GND

A0 SIG

Schematics, diagrams and documents