SparkFun Mini Tristimulus Color Sensor – OPT4048DTSR (Qwiic)

The SparkFun Qwiic Mini Tristimulus Colour Sensor is built around the OPT4048 High-Speed High Precision Tristimulus XYZ Color Sensor from Texas Instruments. This Mini Sensor features a single-chip high-resolution colour sensor capable of measuring four channels, each with specific engineered spectral responses. This Mini-sized breakout board is only 0.5in. by 1in. big and has been equipped with two I2C Qwiic connectors to make interfacing with the OPT4048 a bit easier. It’s part of SparkFun’s Qwiic connect system, so you won’t have to do any soldering to figure out how things are oriented. However, we still have broken out 0.1′-spaced pins if you prefer to use a breadboard.

Three of the four channels on the OPT4048DTSR closely match the CIE tristimulus spectra, with the fourth channel having a wide-band spectral response. With measurements from these channels, essential characteristics of the lighting environment can be extracted, like (i) light intensity (lux), (ii) colour in CIE XY, LUV coordinates, and (iii) Correlated Color Temperature. This aids in applications where measuring the precise characteristics of the lighting environment is critical, like display brightness, colour temperature adjustment, camera colour temperature correction, object true colour recognition, & medical applications.

We’ve written an Arduino library to make reading the various measurements easy.

Get Started with the Qwiic OPT4048DTSR Tristimulus Colour Sensor Guide

Features

• I2C Interface (Qwiic-enabled)
• Selectable I2C Address: 0x44 (default), 0x45, 0x46
• 2x Horizontal Qwiic Connectors
• Mini 0.5in. x 1in. Footprint
• Supply Voltage Range: 1.71-3.6V
• Four-channel sensing using precision optical filters
• XYZ tristimulus channels with close matching to CIE 1931 spectra with excellent IR rejection
• Clear wide bandwidth channel
• High-resolution colour measurement in CIE XY, LUV space, correlated colour temperature (CCT) along with ambient lux measurement
• Semi-logarithmic output with seven binary logarithmic full-scale light ranges and highly linear response within each range
• Built-in automatic full-scale light range selection logic, which switches measurement range based on input light condition with excellent gain matching between ranges
• 26 bits of effective dynamic range from 2.15mlux to 144klux
• 12 configurable conversion times from 600µs to 800ms per channel is an excellent choice for a wide variety of high-speed and high-precision applications
• External pin interrupt for hardware synchronized trigger and interrupts
• 24µA (with ultra-low power standby (2µA)) low operating current
• –40°C to +85°C operating temperature range

Resources

• Schematic
• Eagle Files
• Board Dimensions
• Hookup Guide
• Datasheet (OPT4048)
• Arduino Library
• Qwiic Info Page
• GitHub Hardware Repository