 If you want the best NPI, you need to listen to what Lady Aida is about to say. Did you key an Aida here? That's right. Bring you. E-I-N-P-I. That's from the Aida for Live studio band that's over in the next room. That's right. Thanks for the intro. Okay. This week, Ion NPI is a product from ST. That's right. We did a bunch of microcontrollers and wireless stuff, and I wanted to get back to my favorite type of chip, which is a sensor. This is a rendering of a very new update to a popular sensor series from ST following the footprints of the VL6180 and the VL53L0X or L1X. There is now the VL53L3CX, this is the fifth generation of chip, and these are basically micro lidars, which is really cool. The way it works is inside there's a photon emitter, and it's called a VCSL, and it emits infrared light. It's not like an LED, it's actually a laser that shoots out these photons, and then a sensor on the same chip measures how long it took for that photon to bounce from the emitter off the target and back. It's like picosecond range, so this is an amazingly fast time of flight module, and they're so small, they take a lot of measurements, and then they can actually tell you with a millimeter precision how far something is. This is the overall design called flight sense. The way that a lot of people sense is with infrared, that's a common distance measurement where you actually have, in this case there's an LED on the left, and it's even kind of rounded, you can see it's round, and on the right there's the detector, and it bounces infrared light and it measures the amount of light that comes back. This is a very inexpensive, simple way to do sensing, but it does have some downsides. I'm talking about this? Yeah, here's the comparison. Conventional IR is very common, it's very simple, but it doesn't give you the actual distance, it just tells you how much light, and it's not easy to compare that amount of light, because it's not like the time of flight distance, it's just like there's more IR, there's less IR. It can tell you approximately how close something is, but not exactly how close something is. It also is commonly affected by the color, the reflectivity of the thing it's sensing, so they often test with a 50% gray card and how much light reflects off of it, but if you have something that absorbs more light because it's darker, it often thinks that it's farther away because more light is absorbed, less light is reflected, so it's like, oh, that thing is farther, and so we've seen this come up in hand soap dispensers. That's right, we've all seen this video and we've witnessed this firsthand, even at Adafruit, because we have a whole diverse company, and also now we have multi-colored gloves and we have these sensors. Yeah, like you have a black glove and you try to put your hands... Some of them don't work, some of them do, so you have to figure out a way to say, well, okay, it's not just dark. So we've seen this happen. This is a real-world engineering problem. This is a real-world engineering problem, and so another type of sensor that sometimes people use is ultrasonic, but ultrasonic also has some downsides in that you can't put something in front of it. It's very bulky. It's inexpensive, but also it can be affected by noise. So infrared LED distance sensing is something that we use a lot, but there's definitely a lot of situations where you can get a bad user experience because the reflectivity or ambient light can affect your readings. So this family of chips, again, they started with the VL6180X, which is very simple, and then upgraded to the VL53L0X, which we have a breakout for, goes up to 2 meters, and then this is from a slide for the VL53L1X, which was like, wow, it can go up to 4 meters, and there's a programmable field of view. So this slide's already old because now there's this new generation. And what's cool about this is it's the same package as the VL53L0X. So if we go to the overhead. Yeah, well, we have this photo. No, you just want to get over it. That's just my reminder to show it off. So this is the breakout for the 53L0X, let me autofocus. I'm going to make this star this thing, because it's going to get carried to us. So the package here, you can see the emitter and the receiver. I should have known which one is which, but one of these is the emitter, one of the receiver. And it's such a tiny little package. And here I got some of these new 53L3CXs. It's a very simple package. It's like an OQFN type thing. It's got the pads on the underneath, but they're fairly large. It's not like a BGA or anything. And inside is a little mic control that runs firmware that you talk to to get readings from. And it has a cover tape that protects it. So that's the L3X. So you can, if you have a board or a sensor that's using the 53L0X, this is pin compatible. You can just drop it in and the firmware is a little different, but the pin out and power requirements are the same. So what's really interesting about this sensor, the VL53L3X, is it has this new capability of doing multi-zone detection. So it can detect four different distances. It's not just one distance. It'll tell you within the field of view that it can see. It can measure different distances. You could probably do gestures or have different heights of fingers or something. So this is kind of neat because it's like, it's really getting into micro LiDAR technology. It's basically doing four point LiDAR, but in like this one by three millimeter package. So I think that's neat. You also pointed me to a video. Do you mind if I play it? It's about a minute, two minutes. Yeah. This video talks about the flight sensor technology overall, and then we'll show people to buy it. All right. Let's show this, and then we're going to show them on Digikey where to get it. All right. Take the WST. Hello. My name is John. And today I'm going to change your life. I'm going to show you how an ST time of flight sensor can be used in several applications. The first one, we have the sensor hooked right here, as small as it is. It's hooked to a PC-like device. And as soon as you step in front of it, the device comes alive. When I step back, the screen powers down to save power. The screen can also be made for add to security. That's the ST time of flight sensor. In another application, we can hook it to a cell phone. In this application, I'm trying to spoof with a picture of me, the face detect. But because I know the distance from the sensor to the picture, I know that the size of the face is not correct. So that one's gone. If I have a more realistic size picture, the face size is correct, but the number of photons returned from my sensor from this picture to here is incorrect. It doesn't work. If I choose the real device, you can see that it detects my face. Now, the trouble is with this sensor is it's kind of ugly. And UI developers don't like ugly holes in their cell phones. So what we've done is hide the sensor behind an optically black or an optically opaque piece of plastic. And as I move my hand in front of each sensor, you can see that it works, but you can't see the sensor. It's a perfect for your application. It's the ST time of play. All right. So just one thing is people are looking at this in the chapter like, I know what I'm going to use this for. I know what I'm going to use this for. I know this is a great thing for my project. This is why we're doing I and MPI. And this is why. By the way, I'm not saying you have to adjust this one. The MPI, of course, is incredibly cool. But the whole family is just a great set of sensors. The most important thing is we do this is because you get this on DigiGate. OK. And this is so fresh. There isn't even a valve board ready for it yet. So this is like the hottest, freshest, noopiest MPI. But you can pick it up at DigiGate. They obviously had a wheel of like a thousand. I picked up 30. Somebody else picked up a couple. Search for VL53, L3CX. They haven't cut tape. They have tape and reel. You know, they have DigiReal if you want. There's software available downloaded from ST. I'm kind of currently working through it, trying to get it to be Arduino compatible. But there is like read multi. You know, the software for it does say that you can read multiple points of distance data. So up to four points. So this is kind of cool because you can see that they're solely working up to like having a full 2D LiDAR. Like, you know, you can measure a 2D square and give you back a point cloud. So that will be super cool when that's available in the future. But for now, pick this one up. And that is on Ion MPI. Thank you, DigiGate.