Good day,
I’m new to this site and are in need of some information on a project I’m busy working on. I’ve searched the forum including google but was unable to find the solution. Hopefully someone here could point me in the right direction.
I need to connect +/-50 VL53L0X sensors to an Arduino Uno board. I’m quite new to this and need some advice. Do I require a “I2C GPIO expander board” for this?
Does anyone have a schematic of such a setup?
I’ve read some of the topics but it only covers connecting up to 5 sensors
Any info would be highly appreciated.
Regards
Nico
Hello.
The configuration for running 50 of these boards is very similar to the configuration for running 5 of them, only you need 50 I/O pins dedicated to the XSHUT pins instead of 5. The Uno does not have that much I/O, so you would need some kind of multiplexer like the I2C GPIO expander board you mentioned, though an Arduino Mega 2560 might work for an application like that without one.
You might look at some of the resources for the MCP23017 available at Adafruit for more information about how an I2C GPIO expander works.
Also, you might run into issues with the electrical properties of an I2C bus with 50 devices on it and you might need to solve some engineering problems for your system to ensure good signal integrity to all of the devices on the bus. We do not have any specific advice for getting a bus with that many I2C devices to work well, but you should be able to find whitepapers that discuss that more thoroughly.
-Nathan
