Rotating Sensor for Multi-Direction Light Intensity Measurement

Ambient light usually is heterogeneous due to the varying of daylight and occupancy illumination. The performance of many applications, such as intelligent lighting control, heavily depends on the light sensor system. It is necessary to have a sensor system that can measure the light intensity in different directions. A light sensors network, usually used in lighting con- trol system, requires many sensors located at multiple locations. It is difficult to change the number of sensor and the locations in the system. We introduce a novel system which uses only a single sensor rotated by a stepper motor to measure light intensity from different directions. After identified the sensor direction, the system measures the light intensity and transmits the data to a monitoring unit. The rotating sensor could be able to communicate with the Internet of Things data monitoring platform. We have performed experiments in a normal occupancy workroom. The results show that our sensor may measure light intensity in multiple directions. Besides, the sensor can detect whether some directions were blocked while firmly measuring light level on the other directions.