Light Sensor TSL230 Help

Tom P

I would like to monitor six TSL230 light sensors and display them via Debug.
Some sort of program that steps through the different sensors
I would fix the sensivity and scalling to X10 via +/_ pins.
Can anyone help with a program to do this.

Mike Green

There's very little difference between monitoring 6 sensors and monitoring one sensor.
The TSL230 has an output enable pin which you'd connect with a pullup resistor to an I/O pin.
You can connect the other pins in parallel. To "step through" the sensors, you'd just initialize
the six I/O pins to HIGH, then step through them setting one to LOW for the measurement,
then setting it to HIGH again. It's easiest if the 6 I/O pins are sequential so you can do:

FOR i = 0 TO 5
   LOW the1stPin+i
   ' measure level - use TSL230 example as model
   HIGH the1stPin+i
NEXT

Tom P

I would like to be able to scan all 6 sensors continuously.
Will the above example do this?

Mike Green

You can only process one sensor at a time. The Stamp is a single-threaded processor and can only perform one function at a time. When it's counting the output pulses of a single TLS230, it can't do anything else. You would need some kind of external hardware to do the counting for all six or you would need to use a Propeller which has multiple processors (plus two independent counters in each processor). The Propeller is also fast enough to be able to count several sensors simultaneously using a single processor with assembly language.

Chris Savage

Tom,

This is a duplicate thread…You have already posted this at the link below. In the future, please follow up on your original thread rather than starting a new one. If not for replies I would have removed this one already.

http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=718387

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Chris Savage
Parallax Tech Support