HW 486 Photoresistor Module Arduino for beginners Sensors

All right folks, welcome to Arduino for Beginners. This is Arduino 101. And we're looking at this little guy. Now this is a photoresistor. This one is pre-built onto a board and the board is labeled HW486. Now what this does is senses light and how much of it. And you can use this to turn things on and off depending on whether or not it's daytime or nighttime. And it's a pretty handy little device. But let's jump over to our code real quick because it's super simple and I want to show it to you before we get this running. So the first thing we have up here is the sensor pin. And we are hooked into number two. But we are hooked into analog number two. Not the digital pin. We're in the analog pin. And then we have an integer value at zero. And that's it. We're going to go right into setup, turn on our serial monitor with a baud rate of 9600. And then we're going to jump right into the loop. And all we're doing is setting value, this integer here, equal to the analog read of the sensor pin. That's right. Analog read. Not digital read. Then we are going to hit serial dot print line and then the value in decimal here. So basically it's going to print low values if the light is really high and high values if the light is really dark. So then there's a little delay in there. And I will show you this through the serial monitor. Let's go ahead and upload. And it doesn't take long at all. Pretty quick little sketch. Go ahead and grab the serial monitor. And it is already outputting data. So we're getting about 210 there. What happens if I point it at my production lights? It goes down even lower. What happens if I cover it with my hand? Well then you get your super, super dark high values there. And when I move away my hand, super, super low because it's getting a lot of light. And I can actually turn this a little bit more and make it a little glare. But you can see it affect the sensor. Super, super sensitive sensor. So that's the reason we're using the analog input is because we want all those different values, not just an on or an off. Because that will allow you to do something like adjust the dimness of dimness of the lights in your smart home according to how much ambient light is around. So you can put out more power to the overhead lights if not enough light is reaching the floor. Say because the sun's going down or something like that. So pretty interesting and handy little device. They do have them without being attached on the board. I don't know if I have one around here, but they look just like this simple component right here. And they're fairly easy to hook up and fun to play around with. Well, that's it guys. That's going to wrap up this video. If you've noticed the shirt, the merch is available. Go ahead and check out the Teespring merch link down below. It won't be available on a channel store until I reach 10,000 subscribers. And so far I am just about to hit 5,000. So it'll be a little while, a couple more months before you see this on the actual channel, but they are available now. I have a couple other designs. Feel free to pop over there and check them out and know that any purchase through the Teespring site definitely helps to promote our site here and increase the channel's ability to make videos in the future. So we appreciate all your support. Don't forget to check out the Teespring link. Check out our Patreon link. Leave a like on this video and hit that subscribe button because we have a lot more coming at you in the coming days.