I'm intrigued by the AMS AS7341 11-channel spectral color sensor, and I've reached the limits of what I can learn from its (somewhat disappointing) datasheet and application note documentation. It's time to get some hands-on experience with the device, which hopefully would help me understand more of the documentation in a positive feedback cycle. Plus I just want to start playing with it.

I could buy the sensor chip itself from Digi-Key, which has published a product page highlighting AS7341. Cost is reasonable for single quantities ($11.42 at time of writing) but at 3.1mm x 2mm x 1mm it is far too small for me to handle directly. I need a breakout board. The most obvious choice is AMS' own evaluation kit, but that is priced far too high ($189.38) for me to stomach. Thankfully there are other companies providing AS7341 breakout boards for electronics hobbyists like myself.

DFRobot is one of these companies, and it has not one but two AS7341 offerings that differ by physical interface. Product SEN0364 has connectivity via DFRobot's "Gravity" connector. Its sibling product SEN0365 has generic 0.1" pitch breadboard-compatible headers. They both have mounting holes and voltage level shifters/converters for both signal and power interface with 3.3V and 5V parts. (AS7341 itself is a 1.8V part.) The Gravity port only has I2C communication, but the 0.1" header version also break out INT (optional signal for "reading complete") and GPIO (optional signal for "start reading"). Both include a pair of white LEDs for illumination controlled by AS7341 LDR pin, but that also meant LDR was not brought out so we can't use it to control external lights.

On the software front, DFRobot provides an Arduino library and several example projects. I thought their household lights comparison test was very interesting, using an AS7341 to show difference in emission spectra of various household lights. I understood the spectral plots, but they lost me when the math started going into CIE color spaces like the AMS calibration data sheet did. The biggest problem with this example project is that its online listing is incomplete: the Arduino sketch for interfacing with AS7341 is listed, but the Processing sketch was missing. It plots results on a desktop computer screen and screenshots were included in the project writeup. Without it we'd just have a bunch of numbers in a serial terminal. It shouldn't be too hard to recreate using Processing's Serial library if one felt motivated to do so. Still, its absence was annoying.

Interesting but incomplete example projects won't change the fact DFRobot SEN0364 and SEN0365 seem like reasonable options for AS7341 breakout boards. Another option for AS7341 breakout board is Adafruit product #4698, which is what I eventually bought for myself.