 to the show it's me John Park and it's time for JP's product pick of the week we are here again and I want to thank everyone for stopping by everyone over in the discord as well as in our YouTube thank you so much if you're over on Twitch or other places and wondering where the chatting is happening you can check out our discord just by going to adafru.it you can jump over into the live broadcast channel and you'll see all these good people having having excellent discussions and commentary so thank you everyone for stopping by in the chat and let's get on with the show so what I want to do is let you know you can head to this URL right here or you can go over to that QR code and that will take you right to the product page where you will see this video is playing right inside the page so you won't miss anything and you will find a discount I think we have a 50% off discount this week on the product pick I'm gonna refresh my page right now and that is available just by purchasing it yes 50% off all you have to do is put it in your car and buy it before the show is over we have a little bit of a grace period at the end there but there's no coupon code necessary we simply have reduced the price just during the live stream so that you can pick up one or five or ten of this maximum of ten and that is how you can take advantage of our really deep deep discount for the product pick of the week for I go any further let's have Lady Aida tell us all about this one so take it away Lady Aida the Vemmel Vemmel 7700 this is a step by Qt with a twist so this sensor actually comes in two part numbers one is like the vertical type and one is the horizontal type and this is the right angle this horizontal version so if you see the sensors that little pink purple is square in the middle there the sensor points out most of our light sensors point up off of the board and this one sort of points parallel to the board this could be very helpful if you're doing like some sensing through a slit or if you have to mount it in a certain way or you're like you're trying to measure something passing by not sure what but I thought it'd be kind of handy and while we're at it we stem a Qt if I the whole thing so you can plug and play it with all of our I squared seaboard like the KB 2040 which has a stem a Qt port also cool thing cat any addition it's a cat any addition cat any worked on this board and she also has been doing so much work with the stem a Qt vacation she gets to have her signature on the back of this another thing that I think is kind of cool is you know electronics and have the people that make it people made electronics that's right can he made this now you know so check this out this is a great low-cost luck sensor and we're hoping to add it to our giveaway our freebie giveaway because it's such a handy one there we go yes someone someone said this in the chat this is a cat any sensor so if you are trying to detect cat knees I don't think you could find a finer sensor this is the one so let me go ahead and grab mine in fact there it is in my little velvety box of goodness oh yes look at that beauty there it is the product pick of the week it is the right angle luck sensor Vemel 7700 with stem a Qt now like lady Ada said we have a previous version of this board that does not yet have the stem a Qt connectors on it so you need to solder pins to that one and put it on a breadboard or wire it to your microcontroller this one has the stem a Qt and this one has the sensor mounted at an angle essentially parallel to the board instead of perpendicular to the board which means you can fit this in some tiny little areas I have a little quick demo I want to show you in fact using my little box here what I'm gonna do focus this just a little bit before we get going there and that'll work for now I'll probably have to change that in a second so what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to take this little set of boards here and you'll notice I have one of our OLEDs and a feather I decided not to solder any of the pins to that so I'm using stem a Qt for the OLED as well and what I can do is plug in stem a Qt to my little Vemmel sensor and I'm gonna daisy chain that over to the OLED display and let's give power to the board here and so you can see this is immediately giving us a luxe reading and that will vary if I put my finger in front of that you can see it'll go down quite low pretty much dark if I totally cover that and since this is mounted at this angle I should be able to stick this inside of my little box here and you'll notice it's just peeking out right there you can disable that LED by the way so it's just peeking out there and we're getting just from my ambient lighting in the room about 35 luxe and as I put my hand over that it gets pretty dark down to one so you could use this for detecting objects particularly for things like security things puzzles escape room stuff I always like things like that magic tricks if you want to have it mounted fairly discreetly so you can imagine if this were a sort of typical board where it's mounted facing up we can't really fit it in is quite a small an area now of course you can use a sensor that isn't connected to a board like this but this breakout makes it very easy to use and in this case it's actually still really svelte fitting right down in there you can see it just kind of barely peeking out and yet we're still able to get a reading off of that so if you want to take a look at code that we're using for that let's jump to this view here this is I'm running this in-circuit Python there's also Arduino library for this that makes it easy to use if you take a look at my code I'm simply importing this library Adafruit Vemmel 7700 I'm setting that up on I squared C and then I'm doing some display stuff as well setting up a little text area for my display and then reading it is as simple as this right here I can print to my serial port or to my text area Vemmel dot luxe and that just reads out luxe which if you're not familiar with it luxe is essentially the amount of light hitting a area so a surface that's actually being hit by light so it's not the same as how much light is being emitted by something but it's actually the amount of light that's hitting a surface I believe it might be defined as a one meter square one meter from a light source I think that's the definition and so really useful for things like photometers if you want to you can write some code to convert the formulas into exposure values and f-stops based on different isos a lot of people make little DIY photos and photometers for photography if they're doing film in particular and use a sensor like this so that's one one possible use for a sensor like this as well as just simple detection of the ambient lighting which you find in you in use in things like TV sets and laptops and smartphones when you want to dim based on environmental lighting you can use a luxe sensor like this this also in the library if we go and check out our product page here you can click on the link to the guide this little primary guide link here I'll tell you the pinout for using the I squared C as well as there's a jumper on the back that you can cut right there above where it says catney there's a little LED jumper there they'll turn off that green LED if you need to make sure that none of the ambient light from that LED is confusing your readings and then if you click on the documentation we have the API documentation in read the docs and here you'll see things that you can really fine-tune such as the gain if you're trying to get a tighter band of your luxe reading or a wider band you can adjust the gain you can also adjust the integration time how many samples how long it takes to essentially read to get a value so that you can increase or decrease the resolution depending on your needs needs so you'll find all of that in the read the docs which is at docs.circupython.org slash project slash VEML 7700 and then this one is the English language latest API HTML so you can you can get to all of that from the library if you simply go to circuit python.org and find the library for this that'll take you all through it so yes so some other uses for it some people are mentioning in the chat see Grover said automated solar cell positioning so if you want to use a few of these perhaps to sort of triangulate brighter areas and use motors things like that that's certainly possible small robots that do light sensing also I like to I haven't tried this yet but I like to take a flashlight and see in different settings what kind of values we're getting because this thing has a an upper limit of I think a hundred and twenty thousand lux so it can it can get a pretty bright light so at this distance I'm holding this flashlight in its high setting and I'm getting about 3500 and if I go to its dim setting about 300 so huge difference in light there it's some people like to compare different flashlights to see what they what they get this one's high-end beam is the same as that other one and it's a little low-end bottom beam for your feet is about 700 so another use for that this can also be used to tell you some while it's tuned to and has the math on board to give you lux which is great because that's an actual meaningful unit of measure you can get a white white light value I'm not sure what units that's in that's that's just simply built on to the chip and I think an ambient light value and I'm not sure what units those are that one might just be at the 16-bit upper upper range of the of the device so a lot of fine-tuning you can do to get the exact type of readings that you want depending on your needs so let's see I think that covers everything on our on our product pick of the week I'll also mention from the chat someone said that the great Scott has a good how-to video on doing automated solar cell positioning so that's terrific if you look up pretty much anything that uses a light sensor and that can that can mean a lot of different things but they can very often be used for similar types of projects so I think that's going to do it like I said head on over to this product page right here this is the URL 5378 is the product ID if you head there you can get these for half off maximum of 10 per customer and we still have stock of those I'm happy to say and let me know in the chat if you have any other questions if you have any project suggestions with these really great little cell let's see what else I think that's going to do it so let me unplug this unceremoniously from my board here I'll go ahead and leave one of my cables on so I can hang that and that is going to do it for this product pick the product pick of the week is the right angle Vemel 770 luxe sensor with stem aqt and extra bonus I have to hang up the OLED sensor I'm going to do that after because this is this is the feather the OLED feather that I used last week so I'll put that back on the board I stole it right there from the neighbor so if you have project ideas for putting together different boards let me know alright thanks everyone for stopping by for a different industries I'm John Park this has been JP's product pick of the week