 This week's IonMPI brought to you by DigiKeyNate for it is from ST. We've got another one of the ST sensors and this is one that's actually available in stock. ST makes a lot of sensors. I like to sprinkle them throughout the year because I don't like to have only one vendor but they do make amazing time of flight sensors. So this week's product is the VL53L5CX. Now ironically the actual sensor does not have that printed on it so nicely but that is the part number and this may sound familiar because ST has been a lot of sensors in this family called I think the Flight Sense family of time of flight sensors. So the way it works is inside is you know an infrared laser and it actually like literally bounces light off an object and measures how much time it takes to get back and they started with like the VL6180 which you know I think was about like a meter distance max and then they had the VL53L0X the 53L1X LCX and then now the VL53L5CX which is the 5 and 4 was the 3 for the 1 for the 0. So it's like the number is incrementing and they skipped 4. Why? I don't know. But this version of the sensor it's the same idea it does distance measurements using time of flight but one thing that's kind of sorry this is the showing you know it measures photon distance but what's really neat about the V53VL5 is that it now has a matrix of 8 by 8 that it can use to do you know like LiDAR in in two-dimensional space not just point. So if you see here the history of these chips starting with the 6180 and we have breakouts for you know all the early ones you know as they got better and better the distance got better so 20 centimeters to 80 centimeters to 200 to 400 and then with the VL53LX it does multi-target or multi-zone detection. So what does that mean? Okay so go to the next slide. You can see kind of the bottom right is the multi-zone distance detection. So you can basically instead of just having a single point of light that you like throw at the whatever object you're bouncing off of which is how all the other sensors work they were single point distance sensor it'll actually split up the field of view which is about 60 degrees into a 4x4 or 8x8 grid and then tell you the distances for all of those items. Now it's not going to be as fast because it's going to it actually does like you know it's usually 60 Hertz and I think it actually does one 60 Hertz measurement time either 4x4 or 8x8 but it's kind of cool because you actually kind of get like a grid of measurements and you can do stuff like gesture sensing or like object detection you can do some basic machine learning on it because you get many more points of data. You can you know showing here the 8x8 grid and the distance so you can start doing things like you know if your hand is going back and forth not just up and down or if it's moving in a circle I have a demo I'll show you know kind of what the quality is although I think you know you can do more filtering on it but it actually works like you can get data and across again a range of up to four meters 400 centimeters for each data point in the 8x8 grid. And this is what it looks like you know you can do 4x4 you can do 8x8 I didn't try 4x4 I've only tried 8x8 why would you do 4x4 it's much faster because you don't have to measure as many data points so you know you pick the which one you want. What I like about ST is they're now releasing an ultra light driver for their sensors so this is a sensor that's actually quite easy to port to a microcontroller you can port it you know people port it to Arduino you can port it to you know whatever chipset you want. Historically it's been very hard to get drivers that weren't tied specifically to whatever chipset and IDE the company wants to use so if it's like NXP it'll only work with MCU Expresso and then if it's you know Atmell or Microchip it'll only work with you know Atmell Studio or the or the PIC IDE or MPID but what's nice is this driver was completely agnostic and you can use it with GCC or Keele or whatever you want all you have to do is implement the iSquared C and GPIO data rights and I think like a delay and it'll actually do the rest of it which is pretty cool. We even designed a breakout although it's not done yet but it wasn't too hard to put it together again the pinouts are even though it's not physically the same size as the VL53 L1 or L0 the pinouts are very similar like the overall design is not that much different. They did add a iSquared C low power like iSquared C reset that's the iReset pin and that's to allow people one of the things that has always been a annoying is there's a fixed iSquared C address and there's no iSquared C address jumpers and if you want to have like a bunch of these you can hook them up on the same bus and put them into reset like all but one put into reset and you can reset it into a new iSquared C address but it always meant you had to like physically like actually reset the whole thing. Now there's just iSquared C reset so it's a little easier to just turn off only the iSquared C section without having to turn off the whole chip because it does take a couple seconds to boot and best of all it's in stock. Available on Digikey 257 when I checked. 957. Oh yeah sorry. Yeah 957 so there's quite a few pick them up they also have some dev kits I'll show off I got like little breakup boards but they also have nucleo you know add-ons for ST development boards. Want to show your demo? Yeah I'll show the demo so this is the so this is the I got two breakup boards because I'm smart I always get sorry I actually came with two breakup boards. This little kit. This one's nice because it just gives you the sensor here as you can see and then a bunch of pins and then like I think this is a 2.8 volt LDO soldered on and the you can even kind of see this blinking here that's the time of flight laser you know coming out from the from the sensor and then you know it's diffraction grated into the 4x4 8x8. I'm going to move this over here so this is a clue board and I'll say like I think this is a little bit more work this is like me spending like you know a couple hours on it only you know it definitely if I put my hand and then I tilt my hand you can see the tilt of the hand does you know change the gradient from you know being light on you can if I tilt my hand it does you know it does do some detection what would be really good I think to do next is I want to do some bipolar interpolation just like we did with our thermal cameras but you can see how you can do like gesture sensing recognition and they also have a video on using this for water level sensing apparently another really good use if you don't want to actually dunk something in water you can just have this because it can do four or eight meters some of the versions of this chip can do eight meters so that's this chip so you know basically that the upshot is it's a very similar to the previous 53l 1x is but it now does this 8x8 grid so you can use it as like a micro lidar for you know robotics applications or gesture recognition all right and that's this week's eye on MPI