No, not a HiTechnic sensor in this episode of Exposed. Yesterday someone on the Mindboards forums asked what the third bump on the LEGO Colour Sensor was for. I was curious enough to take a small blade to one of my sensors and take it apart. I did take some grainy pictures but figured I could probably get better ones today. So here it is, the LEGO Colour Sensor, exposed in all its glorious nekkidness.
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| The top of the small printed circuit board (PCB). You can clearly see the difference between the two eye-like component. The bottom one has 4 legs, one of each colour component (Red, Green and Blue) and a common cathode or anode. The top component must be the photo-detector. | This is the bottom of the PCB. The small processor seems to be an Atmel of some kind. There’s some scribbling on the chip, so it’s hard to make out the type. You will also notice the programming header below it, the through-holes at least. |
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| Side view of the sensor, you can see the small plastic frame to hold the RGB LED and photo-detector in place. | Here’s lookin’ at you! If you click to enlarge, you can really see all the little wires in the LED. Pretty cool! |
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| Front view of the sensor cap. Looks pretty fake now, doesn’t it? | You can see that there’s a solid lump of plastic behind the bump. |
If there is a sensor you’d like to see exposed, drop me a note. Make sure you check it’s not one I have done before, though. You can do that by browsing through the Exposed category. Please note that I cannot disassemble Mindsensors sensors, they’re really sandwiched together and it would take a Dremel and a lot of tears to take those apart.
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13 Comments
Love it!
That’s actually pretty cool. It’s also kinda a bummer, though. I had assumed they had red, green, and blue LEDs in there, each one shining a light and checking for it’s own frequency range. :/ Oh well, looks like I’ll have to make my own.
I am not sure how you would do that
You mean each bump is both a sensor and an LED?
- Xander
In theory, does this mean that with special drivers/sensor firmware, you could power any combination of the three colors? Or would you need to change the circuitry inside?
I have no idea what the sensor is capable of. There is no publicly available documentation on its internals.
I imagine it’s hard to search for the chip info when the marker mark is part of it’s ID. How do you type “scratch mark”?
i would realy like to see the ultrasone sensor beeing exposed ! i am verry curious how that look like when its exposed
I just opened one and it’s very cool
Hi Xander,
thanks for your work.
Could you give some infos on how you open the sensors without breaking them?
I had a try with the colour sensor once, but I stopped by fear of breaking it.
What kind of tools do you use and where do you put force to avoid breaking them?
Hi there,
Well, to be honest there is no nice way to open these. As you may have noticed when trying to open yours, there are 2 small tabs on the white cover that hook into the gray body. Those tabs can only come out when the front of the body comes off. The front of the body is hooked into the main part by 3 “hooks”, 2 of which are covered by the white thing on the top. So they really made it a one-way assembly. What you could do is pull the side of the white cover and cut as far into the tab as you can so it leaves a tiny little stub. That way the cover kind of stays when you reassemble later. I have spare covers so I don’t usually worry about that too much.
Thanks.
Have a nice day.
The Bump’s purely for a balanced appearance when the sensor is viewed from the front. Things always look better in odd numbered groupings. Apparently we are hard-wired to perceive it….
Thanks for exposing this! I was troubled to know what the third “sensor” slot was for. Now it is clear there is really nothing there. Also, this sensor is written up as doubled into a lamp but really the LED is there mainly to help the sensor I think. The programming objects talk about reading the sensor with or without the LED turned on.