I am looking for a sensor to visually detect whether a light is on or off. The sensor will linked up to the I/O on a microcontroller. Do you have anything suitable? Would I need anything else to enable the connection?
Hi,
if u dont want to bother with a/d conversion with the microcontroler you could also use an op-amp to give you an on/off signal depending on voltage from the sensor.
RobotShop has an ever increasing number of light sensors. Some specific models you might want to consider are: RB-Spa-72, RB-Phi-13, RB-Inx-14, RB-Inx-35. Note that most of these sensors detect a range of light and output an analog voltage (so it will be up to you to determine at what value the light is considered “on”. If your microcontroller does not have an analog input (which converts a voltage between 0 to 5V into a numeric value, usually between 0 to 1024), you will need an analog to digital convertor which does that for you.