Building instruments with the CS11: a light / colour monitor

  • This instrument reports on temperature, atmospheric pressure, altitude, light intensity (lux), proximity, gestures and will identify the colour of an item placed in front of the light sensor.
  • Readings for these measures are shown on the OLED display, which has six views and is controlled by gestures:

      Hardware requirements:

      To use the supplied code (available further down this page) you will need to have the following hardware:

        The hardware that the code is designed to run with is shown above and listed below.

        • A CS11 microprocessor with microSD card slot.
        • An SW03 weather sensor.
        • An SL06 light / gesture sensor.
        • An OD01 OLED display.
        • An IP03 (or IP02) and a USB cable to connect it to your computer for power and also to allow you to flash the code onto the CS11.
        • Connectors: 1 xPDI and 5 xBus connectors.

        Setting up the hardware:

        The instrument that you will build to run this code could look like this (although the xChips can be connected in a few other ways too):

         

        This How-to guide will show you how to connect xChips and setup your CS11.

        Code:

        The code you need to build this instrument is available for you to download from our GitHub repository. You don't need to register for anything - its all freely available and you won't need to enter any details. Just click that link and it will take you to a public page where you will see the following:

        You can choose either MSE2ME.uf2 or UPDATE.bin - both are files with the pre-compiled code that you need.  The difference is in how you flash the file onto the CS11:

        For MSE2ME.ufc:

        1. Download the latest version of MSE2ME.uf2. 
        2. Connect the IP03 to the CS11 and plug the IP03 into your computer.
        3. Drag-and-drop MSE2ME.ufc onto the CS11 (note - if the CS11 does not show up in your explorer view click the reset button once or twice). 

        For UPDATE.bin:

        1. Download the latest version of UPDATE.bin 
        2. Copy it onto a formatted microSD card.
        3. Place the microSD card into the CS11 and power it up.. 

        Once the code has finished copying over, power up your instrument and get started swiping:

        Controlling the instrument with gestures:

        The SL06 can detect gestures and easily registers swiping movements. This allows us to use it as an input device.

        This instrument is controlled by swiping your hand left, right, up or down, as described below, using screen-grabs from the application:

        There are 6 separate screens in the application. The boxes at the top in orange show which screen is active (the one with the x inside - the first screen in the adjacent image)
        The hand at the top left of the screen indicates that the screen can be changed by a left-swipe or right-swipe gesture - the x in the box will move left or right when you swipe.
        When you swipe to a new page it will have a cross over it, as shown. To select the page you now need to swipe down. Swipe left or right to move to other pages.
        Once a page has been selected it is active for 30 seconds (see the timer in the top-left). During this period the gesture sensing is turned off. After 30 seconds you can change screen.


        Applications for data science:

        Please check out our CS11 Data Science page for ideas and experiments that you can use this instrument with.