Measuring Light With ChipKIT

light meter showing LUX value

How does one go about measuring the amount of light in a given area? With a Light Meter of course! Maintaining proper lighting levels can be very important in places like schools, hospitals and even your own workbench.

[Raj] over at Embedded Labs has put together an excellent tutorial on how to construct your very own light meter based upon the chipKIT platform. The chipKIT Uno32 is similar to Arduino, but boasts a much more powerful PIC32MX320F128 microcontroller.  We’ve seen projects that feature the chipKIT Uno (pdf warning) here before. From playing pong to hosting several temperature sensors, it’s certainly a versatile platform.

The light meter uses an I/O shield and communicates to a BH1750FVI digital light sensor via I2C. The firmware divides the raw data coming off the sensor by a constant, and displays the light intensity data on an OLED display in Lux, foot-candles, and Watts/m^2 units. Be sure to check out the tutorial for full schematics and source.

18 thoughts on “Measuring Light With ChipKIT

      1. You are right, PicKit2 is open sourced. There is also open sourced firmware for PicKit3. Hardware is available in User Guides of both PK2 and PK3.
        For PK2, there is both GUI and command-line open-source PC software from Microchip, or one can also use pic32prog from Serge Vakulenko to program PIC32 devices. Piklab also supports PK2.
        There is a lot of choices.

    1. There are cheap PIC-kit clones on the ebay that work with Microchip’s software, and many open-source programmers. You can build your own, schematics are freely available.

      BTW, that 64pin PIC32 is total overkill for this project, cheap 16F628 (2$) could be used.

      1. The only purpose of the project is to play with the chipkit, not to build a cheap and practical light meter. Also, unless you plan to mass market this item, the difference between a $6 PIC32 or a $2 PIC16 isn’t really worth saving.

  1. If someone claims they can measure lux (illuminance) and watts-per-square-meter (irradiance) using the same device (one being a photometric, the other a radiometric unit), something must be fishy…

      1. I’ve been wondering about that too… the idea is good, but the parts being used have such a wide error range (and thus a very limited level of accuracy) that it would be hard to get good calibration with any reliable degree of precision.

        1. that said, as a project for sake of a project, it’s a good one. It just needs to be abundantly clear to anyone building it that the results as-is won’t be reliable. Then again, if this starts someone down the path to developing further degrees of reliability by using different parts/methods/etc… then that’s a good thing… It’s a good first step, and we all started somewhere. :-)

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