Daily Archives: 2025-10-06 [Monday]

Module Monday #1: KY-010 Photo Interrupter Module | Learning Electronics In The Lab With Jay Jay

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This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video.

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Silly Job Title: Conductor Captain. I am the Conductor Captain!

In this video we take a look at the KY-010 Photo Interrupter. This module sets up a light beam and can detect when the beam is broken. We interface this module with an Arduino Uno after testing it with a simple circuit on the test board to figure out which pins are which. The pin labeled “S” is the signal, the pin labeled “-” is the negative or ground, and the middle pin is 5V VCC. The signal is high when the beam is interrupted and low otherwise.

There is more info about this sensor here: KY-010 Photo Interrupter Module at ArduinoModulesInfo.

Source code is here: 2025-10-06-KY-010-Photo-Interrupter.ino.

We use the Riden RD6006 Bench Power Supply to power our test circuits.

We use the EEVblog BM2257 Digital Multimeter to measure voltages.

We use the Kaisi S-160 45x30cm Repair Mat as our workspace.

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Yutiars Flat Paint BrushesThis is an image of the product.notes

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Taking information “out-of-band”

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Over in Intro to Data Oriented Design for Games, Nic Barker explains “taking information out-of-band”. Nic credits Andrew Kelly of Zig fame for introducing him to the idea (see Andrew Kelley Practical Data Oriented Design (DoD)).

The basic idea is that instead of having one list with items that have an enumeration with three different states, you can have three lists where membership implies the enum state, obviating the need to store the enum value in the item anymore, thus saving space and improving cache locality.