An APDS-9960 RGB and gesture sensor acts as a low level machine vision to recognize gestures, colors of objects and distances. The Samsung Galaxy S5 actually uses the same sensor. A bi-directional logic level converter is needed for 5 V micro-controllers, because the APDS-9960 works only with a VCC of 2.4 - 3.6 V.

Wiring diagram:

Mounting bracket design:

I am using this bi-directional level shifter from Adafruit. Those breakouts have usually no mounting holes, so I added a cavity on the back of the mounting bracket, where the level shifter will be glued in place.

A lot of work went today into the vision module. I glued the level shifter into place with 2-component epoxy adhesive, wired the level shifter and the APDS-9960 breakout and assembled the module on MARB's head.

I also tested two APDS-9960 libraries, one from Sparkfun and one from Adafruit. The Sparkfun library is much better regarding the gesture control. It senses every movement correctly at a distance up to 20 cm while the Adafruit fails very often even at much lower distances.

I will also try to detect  colors of close objects, using the k-nearest neighbors algorithm in an n-dimensional Euclidean space. More on that soon in the log Algorithm bits.