 Okay, this week it is AM, Osram, Lady Aida. What is the eye-on-npi product brought to you by Adafruit and DigiKey this week? This is an eye. This is an eye for an optical sensor from AMS, Osram. This week, new, this funky little chip, I actually kind of like this drawing that they made. AMS-7343, a new chip from, it's a spectral sensor. It's got 14 channels, spectral sensing, 12 color, and then one clear and one flicker detection. So it's kind of 12 channels of color, and we'll show all the different spectral colors. And this is a great sensor that is really nifty because normally when you have color sensors, it's something like this, the TCS34725, a well-known and well-loved color sensor. This sensor has RGB and clear, a really old breakout we've had. And you see in the middle there, there's four diodes. There's the clear diode, red, green, and blue, and then they go into an ADC. There's some filtering done, and then you can read the data over I squared C. And this is fine, as long as you're basically trying to look at something and mimic what your eye would see because our eyes, as long as everyone watching this is human, have this kind of spectral response. You have red, green, and blue cones. And then depending on how wavelength hit your eye, a wavelength that is yellow, technically the wavelength is 6, 10 nanometers. What happens is that it triggers your red, green, and blue cones, and then your eyeball perceives it as yellow. And as long as you're detecting the basic color of things like, oh, is it orange? Is this a skittle that's green or blue? You're trying to mimic what a human sees. You can use an RGB color sensor because you're just trying to look at what a human looks at. And that's totally fine. But if you're actually trying to find the more complicated spectral response of something, like this is a lamp and you can see that there's wavelength bands, it looks overall white maybe or maybe a little bit yellowish, but the actual, you know, each nanometer wavelength that is emitted isn't just red, green, blue, it's like there's a continuum. Now if you have a very expensive spectrometer, you can make a graph like this, maybe you don't need something that is completely continuous, maybe you're happy enough with something that can detect a couple separate bands and then you can kind of figure out what bands are emitted by doing some math analysis based on 7 to 12 points. So the previous version of the sensor, which we, you know, the reason I was excited to see this is we've stopped the AS7341, we designed this two years ago, and this sensor you can see here in the middle has, this is I think it was called a 11 channel, but really it's eight different colors and then like clear flicker and then I think like clear minus near IR or something. So it's basically eight ish channels of color spectral sensing, again, way more than the three that you normally get, red, green, blue, that have like orange and have like near IR and have something more violet. So this are, this is the center wavelengths of each channel. So it goes from 415 nanometers up to 910 and then clear and flicker detection again are separate. And then this is the new 7343, so you can see it goes lower down to 405 and it, you know, there's way more bands in the middle there. So you get 12 total bands of peak wavelength detection, it just gets you closer to that, you know, you can see you're getting pretty close to continuous readings, there's like all the way from, you know, ultraviolet down at 350 peaks at spectro responsive red around 680 and then near IR you get a little bit over there on the right, looks like 800 to 900. So, you know, it's much better, it's not, of course it's not fully continuous, but for the price it's really great, I mean, you don't have to have a full spectrometer set up with like a diffusion grading, this actually can read the individual diodes that are doped to respond to each frequency, so you get something that's better than just what humans can see, you actually are getting a more scientifically realistic view of the light that's being emitted. And then this is what the sensor ray looks like, which I just thought was such a cool image, I wanted to include it, so you can see, you know, there's a couple, there's multiple diodes for each color, so like F1 has two diode elements, clear has the four corners and the IR has over the side, I guess, you know, they lay this out in a way so they don't interfere with each other, of course, that's the sensor ray, and then this is how you wire it up, so like the AS7341, the 43 has the spectral sensors in the middle, what's nice is that, you know, you don't even need a lens if you don't want, and then you can connect to it, you should power it from 1.8 volts, you'll need some level shifting perhaps, but you just have I squared C, and interrupt, the GPIO is handy, I think, if I remember correctly, the, like the AS7341, you can use that to control an external illumination LED, like we found a kind of a wide band white LED, you can use that if you're detecting a flat surface rather than light, you bounce your, you know, neutral light off of it and you can detect the color that way, so a nice update to the AS7341 looks like it's pin compatible, you, you know, the code's not going to be completely the same because of course there's more spectral elements, however, you can probably start with our Arduino C or Python slash circuit Python code to get you started with this chip. Okay, and available on Digi-Key, and when we say available, we actually mean it. Wow, it's in stock. Okay, I can get 366 of them. And it's not too expensive, I mean, it's like six bucks, so it's very cheap for what you're getting. And they have a cool video, so we're going to play that and we'll see on the other side. This video is for the AS7341, but it's very similar and I thought it was in theme, so just be aware that 7343 has more elements, but the video talks about, you know, only 11, this one has 14. I've worked for AMS for 10 years and I manage the field applications engineering team for the Americas. I would definitely want to be able to sense and enjoy the beauty of color, so I would choose to be the AMS AS7431 11 channel spectral sensor. The human eye is amazing. I have lenses in my eyes and I can sense all these wonderful colors while the AS7341 sensor also allows the sensing of eight channels of visible light, but even beyond the visible light, which my eyes can see, the 7341 does two things that my eyes can't even do. It can sense flickering, like in light sources, and also the AS7341 is able to sense near infrared, which I definitely can't see. I think if I were the AS7341 spectral sensor, I would be able to enjoy all these colors, both seen and unseen at the beach here today.