HS6503 VL53L0X Time-of-Flight (ToF) Laser Ranging Sensor module with IIC interface.
The VL53L0X sensor contains a very tiny invisible laser source and a matching sensor. The VL53L0X can detect the “time of flight”, or how long the light has taken to bounce back to the sensor. Since it uses a very narrow light source, it is ideal for determining the distance of (only) the surface directly in front of it. Unlike sonars that bounce ultrasonic waves, the ‘cone’ of sensing is very narrow. Unlike IR distance sensors that try to measure the amount of light bounced, the VL53L0x is much more precise and does not have linearity problems or ‘double imaging’ where it would not be possible to distinguish between a very close or a very far away object.
The sensor is small and easy to use in any robotics or interactive project. It can be used with any 3-5V power or logic microcontroller. The module is supplied with a small header.
Communicating to the sensor is done over I2C with an API written by ST, so it is not too hard to port it to a microcontroller. A wrapper library is available for Arduino so that it can be used with any Arduino-compatible board.
Sensing capabilities:
The sensor can measure approximately 30mm to 1.2 meters in default mode. In ‘long range’ mode you can detect as far as 1.5 to 2 meters on a nice white reflective surface.
Arduino library for VL53LOX sensor
