Pulse Width Modulation(PWM) is a method of reducing the average power delivered by an electrical signal, by effectively chopping it up into discrete parts. That way you could dim a light. I also discovered that when dimming light it basically just goes off and on at a particle ratio and cycle. Isn’t that cool?! Yes, it is!!! Light is awesome! I built a PWM to see how it works using an Arduino board, jump wire, breadboard, potentiometer, 220 ohms resistor. The potentiometer is a component that controls electric flow for different light intensities. I used this device to dim and brighten the LED at different ratios. It is also possible to do this experiment without a potentiometer and instead write a code in Arduino to control the dimness and brightness. One of the problems I faced was finding the right ratio that way the on and off won’t be visible to human eyes. It requires several test runs. This also applied to an IR light but won’t be visible to the human eyes to see the different levels of emission.
I included a TSL2591 sensor to read the different levels of light emitted while using a potentiometer. I also observed that the sensor gets saturated at some point.
Another interesting observation was that the sensor has to be facing directly on top of the RED/IR light to get an accurate reading. The next step for me is to design a case on the 3D printer that takes the sensor and the LED/IR light.
