Arduino Proximity Sensor - Activated OLED Smart & Industrial Automation

[Chris Savage]

I saw this posted on the Digikey Instagram page today. I looked at the sensor shown and it isn't even in stock on Digikey, but cost $8.00 for just an object detection sensor. For $3.99 you can buy a SparkFun RGB and Gesture Sensor, which would provide much more control for much less $$$. I just ordered 5 to experiment with.

[granz]

Woah - $3.99, down from $16.75! That is some deep discount. Let us know how it turns out, and what you can get it to do.

[Chris Savage]

Woah - $3.99, down from $16.75! That is some deep discount. Let us know how it turns out, and what you can get it to do.

Will do. What I already knew from looking at it previously, is that it can tell which direction you swipe past it in at least four directions. So, if you watch the video for the Digikey demo using the proximity sensor, they swipe past it and the display comes on. After a few seconds it turns off.

They say it would make a great "status" display. But the OLED can't show very much information on the displays, so I was thinking, what if you use the less-expensive gesture sensor and make it so that swiping up turns on the display, swiping down turns it off, swiping right shows the next page / value of data and swiping left goes to the previous page / value. Swiping at the sensor is a gesture, as well as pulling away. These could be used as input commands as well.

As a bonus, the description says it has an RGB sensor in it as well. If it's what I think, you could activate specific action by swiping color swatches in front of it. I saw a project that I thought used a color sensor, but I was wrong. This project allows a little girl to wave a colored marker in front of a sensor to change the color of the smart bulbs in her room.

You would think, watching this in action, that the sensor was a color sensor and was detecting the color of the marker cap. You would be wrong. Instead, he's embedded RFID chips into the caps of the markers and the sensor detects the RFID tag. I would have used a color sensor myself, which would open up the possibility of holding something of any color up, and not just those things that previously had a chip installed.

[granz]

Woah - $3.99, down from $16.75! That is some deep discount. Let us know how it turns out, and what you can get it to do.

Will do. What I already knew from looking at it previously, is that it can tell which direction you swipe past it in at least four directions. So, if you watch the video for the Digikey demo using the proximity sensor, they swipe past it and the display comes on. After a few seconds it turns off.

Yeah, that video is pretty sad, for that equipment, this could do MUCH more.

They say it would make a great "status" display. But the OLED can't show very much information on the displays, so I was thinking, what if you use the less-expensive gesture sensor and make it so that swiping up turns on the display, swiping down turns it off, swiping right shows the next page / value of data and swiping left goes to the previous page / value. Swiping at the sensor is a gesture, as well as pulling away. These could be used as input commands as well.

Yeah, that could be pretty cool. It reminds me of the old LCD/button shields for the Arduino:

https://www.adafruit.com/product/772?srsltid=AfmBOoopxvkZzNB1tsM21abUKEn4L1SKrfbmoNyL19EuHFyd7xG2CaS6

Only this would be contactless. It seems like this could avoid the troubles of someone literally "mashing" the buttons on a public-facing device. Along those lines (since it seems that these use light, rather than sound waves) try placing this behind a plexi-glass (acrylic, etc.) sheet. If that works, it could be a pretty good public-access interface.

[Chris Savage]

THEY ARRIVED TODAY!!!

You cannot view this attachment.

The gesture sensors were in my mailbox today. I'm not going to do anything with them at the moment, but I will get to them eventually.

[granz]

Hah, just like Christmas! 

[Chris Savage]

Hah, just like Christmas! 

Those PCBs are so tiny! The I²C IC on there is smaller than the capacitor!

[granz]

Those PCBs are so tiny! The I²C IC on there is smaller than the capacitor!

Yeah, I cannot see what the control IC is, can you read the marking?

I'm guessing that they are some of those Chinese sub-10 cent MCUs that were making the hacker rounds a couple years ago. Maybe re-labeled with the supplier's markings after loading up their firmware.

[Chris Savage]

Yeah, I cannot see what the control IC is, can you read the marking?

The IC they're using is the APDS-9960. You can find the datasheet here. A schematic of this board can be found here.

I've attached a larger photo of the module.

[granz]

It looks like the I²C "chip" is actually the entire sensor module. I was thinking that it was just the controller IC, with the capacitor being the sensor module.

Looking at the datasheet, I noticed that the module has the entire I²C circuit shown as just a "black box." I still think that that block, in the "Functional Block Diagram" is a tiny microcontroller. Some of those controllers are the size of a grain of rice (https://www.ti.com/about-ti/newsroom/news-releases/2025/2025-03-11-ti-introduces-the-world-s-smallest-mcu--enabling-innovation-in-the-tiniest-of-applications.html.)