Project 010 – Miniaturizing

Miniature Color Meter for White LEDs

This miniature USB-powered color meter was built to easily and cost effectively sort individual white LEDs in a production environment. Back then, at this LED lighting manufacturer, the white LEDs would not all have the exact same color and it was necessary to sort these modules to give each customer batches of matched light outputs.

A set of spectrometers was deemed too expensive for this production environment, therefore RGB (red-green-blue) sensors were used with acceptable accuracy.

In front of the RGB color sensor there is a diffusor and an optical filter to block UV and IR light.

This miniature version is a variation on the earlier built color meters and was needed to fit in the limited space of the automated sorting equipment. It was built around the tiny Microchip PIC18LF14K50 microcontroller. The firmware was written in assembly language.

Because of the earlier built color meters, the costs to create this smaller version were minimal.

For similar solutions, please see also Project 008 and Project 009.