VL53L1X - Time-of-Flight sensor / Register Information

Support Sensors
1

Hello,

I bought the sensor VL53L1X and I’m surprised for the poor or NULL information about the configuration registers.
My proposal is configure the sensor in short range (up to 1.3m of detection) and with a maximum number of samples per second (every 15 or 20ms). Also it is very important to reduce at maximum the code size.
The idea is delete complex functions as the setMeasurementTimingBudget(…), calcMacroPeriod(…), timeoutMicrosecondsToMclks(…).

Somebody can help me to config the sensor with the minimum code?

Thanks!

Raul.

2

From the VL53L1X data sheet:

The customer must use the VL53L1X software driver for easy and efficient ranging operations to match performance and accuracy criteria. Hence full register details are not exposed. The customer should refer to the VL53L1X API user manual (UM2356).

3

Hello, Raul.

If you are looking at our VL53L1X library for Arduino, note that it is already intended to be a more streamlined alternative to the full API provided by ST. (For comparison, you can look at our implementation of ST’s full VL53L1X API for Arduino).

I think it would be hard to meaningfully eliminate the functions you mentioned without affecting the correct configuration and operation of the sensor. However, it might be possible if you only need to use the sensor with one specific configuration; in that case, you might be able to precompute the appropriate register values instead of having the library/API code do it at runtime. Unfortunately, as Jim mentioned, ST (the manufacturer of the VL53L1X IC) does not provide documentation on the I2C registers, so you would likely have to get the information you need by reverse-engineering the API source code.

ST also provides an “Ultra Lite Driver” API that you could look into, since it is advertised as having a smaller code footprint than the full API, although we have not tried using it yet.

Kevin