This Color Sensor is a complete color detector, including a TCS230 RGB sensor chip and 4 white LEDs. The TCS230 can detect and measure a nearly limitless range of visible colors. Applications include test strip reading, sorting by color, ambient light sensing and calibration, and color matching.

The TCS230 has an array of photodetectors, each with either a red, green, or blue filter, or no filter (clear). The filters of each color are distributed evenly throughout the array to eliminate location bias among the colors. Internal to the device is an oscillator which produces a square-wave output whose frequency is proportional to the intensity of the chosen color.