[PASCO Wireless Sensors]
[Wireless Light Sensor Overview]
Mike: My name is Mike Blasberg.
J.J.: And I'm J.J. Plank.
M: Today, we'll be looking at the new PASCO Wireless Light Sensor.
Let's go ahead and open it up.
J: As Mike takes it out,
I just want to point out that,
similar to some of our other wireless sensors,
this sensor uses a coin cell battery
and low energy Bluetooth to connect to our software.
M: The sensor actually contains two different light detectors.
On the back, we have our ambient sensor.
This can measure UVA, UVB, UV Index, illuminance,
irradiance, and photo synthetically active radiation, or PAR.
On the front, we have our spot sensor.
This can measure red, green, blue, and white light intensity.
Let's go ahead and power the sensor on and connect it to the software.
I'll push the power button on the back of the sensor.
We'll notice the Bluetooth LED starts flashing red,
indicating that it's ready to pair.
J: Now that the sensor is ready to pair, in our software --
-- we're using SPARKvue software --
all we need to do is click on the Bluetooth icon at the top of the screen,
and then find the sensor in this Available Devices list.
It's easy for us to identify which sensor we're using
because there's a six digit number written on the top of the sensor,
and that six digit number matches the one that's shown here in our software.
I just click once to connect to the software, and click Done.
Then on the Home screen here, we'll be shown all of the measurements
that that sensor can make from both sensors.
M: For our first demo, we'll be looking at the UV index,
which is found on the ambient sensor on the back.
J: What I want to do is set up a display
that shows us the UV Index measurement.
To do that, I'm going to shut off this Spot Light Sensor
because we're not using it.
Then I just find the UV Index,
the measurement that we want,
and then click on it here on the Home screen.
That automatically gives us a graph display.
Now, we want to use a different type of data visualization.
We want to go ahead and switch to a digits display.
To do that, we just click on that right arrow,
and it takes us to the display we're looking for.
M: Indoors, we'll be using the UV LED flashlight as our light source,
but you can also have students take the sensor outside
and use the sun at their source.
You can even place the sensor into a logging mode
to collect UV Index data for a day-long experiment.
J: Before he turns the light on,
I'm going to click the Start button here.
We'll start recording data.
M: We'll look at our baseline here of about 0.5 units of UV Index.
We can take something like eye glasses,
or even various pieces of fabric, to test their UV blocking capacity.
As I place the glasses over here,
we can see that it cuts the UV Index down by about half.
Let's go back to the Home screen,
and we'll do another experiment.
J: Let's take a look at some of the measurements
that can be made by the spot sensor here in the front.
Just like we turned off the spot sensor before,
I'm going to turn off the Ambient Light Sensor because we're not using it.
I want to use the sensor to measure red, green, and blue light intensity
as we scan across this dark table top, white piece of paper, and red piece of paper.
We can see how the intensity levels adjust.
To do that, I'm going to build a page here.
We're going to put a graph display in there.
I'm going to add the blue, red, and green measurements to my graph display.
To do that, I just select them one at a time.
We'll go ahead and start with Blue.
I'm going to add another y-axis, add Red,
and then the last one I'm going to add Green.
We've got our measurements on our graph display.
The one last thing I want to do before we start recording data
is turn the sample rate up just a little bit.
Let's go ahead and go to 10 hertz.
We're ready. I'm going to go ahead and click Start.
Mike is going to scan across, and I'm going to auto-scale our graph here.
Then I'm going to click Stop.
Now as you can see here, we've got intensity measurements for all three colors.
At the beginning here across the dark surface,
you'll see that the intensity is about the same for all of them, but nice and low.
Then as he went up to the white light,
it jumped up in intensity on all three of them.
Then when he scanned across the red paper,
you see here that the blue and the green intensities dropped below the red.
That's because the way we see color is
we actually see the light that's being reflected from the surface.
All the other colors are being absorbed,
so with red paper we expect to see red light.
M: For more information on this and other wireless sensors,
please visit pasco.com/wireless.
Thanks for watching.