Arduino Color Sensors - TCS230 & ISL29125

In today's colorful episode we will learn to calibrate and use the TCS230 and ISL29125 Color Sensors with an Arduino.

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Today we will be working with two different color sensors. I’ll show you how they work, how to hook them up, how to calibrate them and how to extract RGB values from them.

The TCS230 (also known as the TCS3200) is a popular and inexpensive color sensor that operates on a wide voltage range. It outputs a square wave whose frequency reflects the color intensity.

The Sparkfun ISL29125 is a more capable sensor that provides a 16-bit digital output using the I2C bus. It also has a programmable interrupt feature that you can set to trigger in response to a specific color.

Both of these sensors will be useful in designing color-following robots, Rubik's Cube solvers or jelly bean sorters. But before you use them you’ll need to calibrate them.

I’ll show you how to calibrate the sensors and then use that calibration data to extract actual RGB values from them.

Here is what we will be covering today:

Color Sensor Operation - 1:15
TCS230 Intro - 2:51
TCS230 Arduino Hookup - 5:31
TCS230 Calibration - 6:18
TCS230 RGB Extract - 12:10
ISL29125 Intro - 17:26
ISL29125 Arduino Hookup - 19:52
ISL29125 Library & Calibration - 21:46
ISL29125 RGB Extract - 27:19

You’ll find an accompanying article to this video at along with all of the code I used.

I hope that you enjoy this video and that it adds some color into your life! And if you have an idea for another video or article you can suggest it at

Thanks for watching!

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