The SparkFun Qwiic Mini Tristimulus Color Sensor is built around the OPT4048 High-Speed High Precision Tristimulus XYZ Color Sensor from Texas Instruments. This Mini Sensor features a single-chip high-resolution color sensor capable of measuring four channels, each with specific engineered spectral responses. This Mini-sized breakout board is only 0.5in. by 1in. big and has been equipped with two I2C Qwiic connectors to make interfacing with the OPT4048 a bit easier. It’s part of SparkFun’s Qwiic connect system, so you won’t have to do any soldering to figure out how things are oriented. However, we still have broken out 0.1"-spaced pins if you prefer to use a breadboard.

Three of the four channels on the OPT4048DTSR closely match the CIE tristimulus spectra, with the fourth channel having a wide-band spectral response. With measurements from these channels, essential characteristics of the lighting environment can be extracted, like (i) light intensity (lux), (ii) color in CIE XY, LUV coordinates, and (iii) Correlated Color Temperature. This aids in applications where measuring the precise characteristics of the lighting environment is critical, like display brightness, color temperature adjustment, camera color temperature correction, object true color recognition, & medical applications.

We've written an Arduino library to make reading the various measurements easy. It can be downloaded through the Arduino Library manager: search for 'SparkFun OPT4048', or it can be found in the Documents section.

The SparkFun Qwiic Connect System is an ecosystem of I²C sensors, actuators, shields and cables that make prototyping faster and less prone to error. All Qwiic-enabled boards use a common 1mm pitch, 4-pin JST connector. This reduces the amount of required PCB space, and polarized connections mean you can’t hook it up wrong.

• I²C Interface (Qwiic-enabled)
  • Selectable I²C Address: 0x44 (default), 0x45, 0x46
  • 2x Horizontal Qwiic Connectors
• Mini 0.5in. x 1in. Footprint
• Supply Voltage Range: 1.71-3.6V
• Four-channel sensing using precision optical filters
• XYZ tristimulus channels with close matching to CIE 1931 spectra with excellent IR rejection
• Clear wide bandwidth channel
• High-resolution color measurement in CIE XY, LUV space, correlated color temperature (CCT) along with ambient lux measurement
• Semi-logarithmic output with seven binary logarithmic full-scale light ranges and highly linear response within each range
• Built-in automatic full-scale light range selection logic, which switches measurement range based on input light condition with excellent gain matching between ranges
• 26 bits of effective dynamic range from 2.15mlux to 144klux
• 12 configurable conversion times from 600µs to 800ms per channel is an excellent choice for a wide variety of high-speed and high-precision applications
• External pin interrupt for hardware synchronized trigger and interrupts
• 24µA (with ultra-low power standby (2µA)) low operating current
• –40°C to +85°C operating temperature range

• Schematic
• Eagle Files
• Board Dimensions
• Hookup Guide
• Datasheet (OPT4048)
• Arduino Library
• Qwiic Info Page
• GitHub Hardware Repository