Arduino TCS3200 COLOR Sensor

Description

Introduction

TCS3200 Color Sensor is a complete color detector, including a TAOS TCS3200 RGB sensor chip and 4 white LEDs. The TCS3200 can detect and measure a nearly limitless range of visible colors. Applications include test strip reading, sorting by color, ambient light sensing and calibration, and color matching, to name just a few. 
The TCS3200 has an array of photodetectors, each with either a red, green, or blue filter, or no filter (clear). The filters of each color are distributed evenly throughout the array to eliminate location bias among the colors. Internal to the device is an oscillator which produces a square-wave output whose frequency is proportional to the intensity of the chosen color. 

Specifications

Single-Supply Operation (2.7V to 5.5V)
High-Resolution Conversion of Light Intensity to Frequency
Programmable Color and Full-Scale Output Frequency
Power Down Feature
Communicates Directly to Microcontroller
S0~S1: Output frequency scaling selection inputs 
S2~S3: Photodiode type selection inputs
OUT Pin: Output frequency
OE Pin: Output frequency enable pin (active low), can be impending when using
Support LED lamp light supplement control
Size: 28.4×28.4mm

Recognition color principle of sensor

To TCS3002D, when choose a color filter, it can allow only one particular color to get through and prevent other color. For example, when choose the red filter, Only red incident light can get through, blue and green will be prevented. So we can get the red light intensity. Similarly ,when choose other filters we can get blue or green light.

TCS3002D has four photodiode types. Red , blue, green and clear, reducing the amplitude of the incident light uniformity greatly, so that to increase the accuracy and simplify the optical. When the light project to the TCS3002D we can choose the different type of photodiode by different combinations of S2 and S3. Look at the form as follows.

The TCS3200 Color Sensor

TCS3002D can output the frequency of different square wave (occupies emptiescompared 50%),different color and light intensity correspond with different frequency of square wave. There is a relationship between the output and light intensity. The range of the typical output frequency is 2HZ~500KHZ. We can get different scaling factor by different combinations of S0 and S1. Look at the form as follows.

The TCS3200 Color Sensor

Connection Diagram

The TCS3200 Color Sensor

If you want to turn on the LEDs on the board, you could connect the led pin to 5v or a digital pin to drive them.