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How to use Lux meter

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Layout
  3. Features
    • Data
    • Configure
  4. How to Use

Introduction

Pocket Science Lab contains a lux meter which can measure real time ambient light intensity. This lux meter can use either the built-in ambient light sensor in your android device, BH-1750 or TSL-2561 lux sensors. The PSLab android application communicates with the Pocket Science Lab using I2C bus to read the two externally connected sensors. This document will help a user on available functionalities and how to use Pocket Science Lab with PSLab application.

Layout

The layout of the oscilloscope graphical user interface contains two main parts.

  1. Data view
  2. Configuration

Features

In the lux meter there are two views that you can navigate to using a bottom navigation bar.

Data

Data view is to display the light value read from either the built-in sensor or I2C connected lux sensor. This view consist with a value guage, chart plot and a statistic panel. Statistics shows the maximum, minimum and average lux values.

Configure

Configure view is used to control the lux meter by changing variuos parameters.

  1. Select sensor
    • Used to select between sensors built-in, BH-1750 and TSL-2561
  2. Gain range
    • When using sensors via PSLab device, can change the gain of the sensor to amplify the signal captured from the sensor. For the BH-1750 can select from 500, 1000 and 4000. For the TSL-2561 can choose from 1 and 16.
  3. High limit
    • User can set a limit to high value of lux so that when it exceeds, the guage will notify using a red indicator.
  4. Update period
    • The time delay between two successive sensor readings can be changed by this parameter. The range is from 100ms to 1000ms.

How to Use it

The default sensor for the lux meter is the built-in sensor. If the android device contains the ambient light sensor, immediatly the data can be observed throught the data view. When using a I2C connected lux sensor, the pin configuration for the sensor is as follows.

Pin in sensor Pin in PSLab
VCC/VIN VDD
GND GND
SCL SCL
SDA SDA

The pin configuration for the TSL-2561 is also as same as above.

Change the parameters update period, high limit and gain range and observe the differences.