Trouble with APDS-9960 on Arduino UNO

Other Hardware Sensors
1

Hey there,

At the moment I'm coding an application which uses the gesture recognition ability of the apds 9960 to interprete hand motion for a smart mirror gesture control. Today the sensor has been sent to me, but when I tried to test it with the five test programs, it didn't work. It always told me that "Something went wrong during APDS-9960 init". The same happened whilst running my own program.

The thing is, everything should be alright. I've downloaded the original sparkfun-library and included it in the right way and I've connected the pins of the sensor with the Arduino UNO properly (Vcc=3.3V, GND=GND, SDA=A4, SCL=A5 and INT=2 of the digital i/o-pins).

I have no clue, how to solve this issue. I would be very thankful if you were able to help me out.

2

The thing is, everything should be alright. I've downloaded the original sparkfun-library and included it in the right way and I've connected the pins of the sensor with the Arduino UNO properly (Vcc=3.3V, GND=GND, SDA=A4, SCL=A5 and INT=2 of the digital i/o-pins).

I strongly guess that you don't use the sensor chip directly but on some breakout board. As you didn't provide a link to it I answer as you would have connected the chip directly.

The APDS9960 has an upper limit of 3.8V on all it's pins. If you connect the I2C pins directly the chip is exposed to 5V by the internal pull-ups of the ATmega328p on the UNO. That may have destroyed the chips I2C interface. You must use a level converter for this sensor.