recommendations on a light or an external temp sensor?

[offbeatmammal 0]

new to playing with a dev board (in my case a CC3200-LaunchXL that I got as a random door prize at an event recently!) and wondering what I can do with it and Energia (got my first simple temperature datalogger pushing to a graph in the cloud and want to do more...)

 

was thinking I'd like to add a light level sensor and an external temp sensor - so I can track temp inside and outside as well as light level - but ... after searching around I'm discovering there's not a really obvious guide for a total newbie to get me started (even knowing what to go buy)

[yosh 121]

For light sensing you could give TI's OPT101 a try, see HERE

Minimal setup would be the OPT101 itself, one resistor and a decoupling capacitor. You can then use the ADC to read the output voltage of the OPT101. Maybe it is possible to sample this IC at TI...

 

For temperature sensing just search the forum, you will find lots of different well documented approaches (including libraries and Energia sketches) here, e.g. for LM35, TMP36, DS18B20, thermocouples, etc .

[Fmilburn 446]

@@offbeatmammal

 

I successfully used the Adafruit TSL2591 Lux Sensor which is very light sensitive with high range on a F5529 LaunchPad (although not the CC3200) a while back.  I modified the Adafruit code to "autorange" and another guy posted a comment on my blog about how to get it to read very low light levels.  You can find my Energia write-up HERE.  If you want to sense light in a rough way you can do that easily with a cheap photo resistor.  Just be very careful not to exceed the voltage limits for analog on the CC3200.  My write-up for the TMP36 in Energia is HERE and as @@yosh says there is a lot on temperature sensors to be found here on 43oh.

 

The blog I linked to above was started as an aid to beginners. I don't maintain it anymore but you might look around it.  I've also posted a link to more sensor code aimed at beginners HERE on 43oh.