MultiZone TOF Sensor Demo - VL53L7CX -OptoLAB

MultiZone TOF Sensor Demo - VL53L7CX
Authors: J. Bajić

This project is simple demo project for ST’s VL53L7CX MultiZone time of flight (TOF) sensor. VL53L7CX TOF sensor represents a state of the art in light ranging technology and the continuation of the ST’s famous FlightSense™ portfolio (FlightSense™ is the trademark of the ST Time-of-Flight technology). VL53L7CX uses a 940 nm VCSEL light source and SPAD (Single photon avalanche photodiode) array to achieve fast and accurate multizone (matrix of 8x8 zones or total of 64 zones) distance ranging sensor within 60° x 60° square field of view (FoV) (90° diagonal). VL53L7CX is designed for multizone ranging distances of up to 350 cm at ranging speed of up to 60 Hz. It can be used for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping or SLAM in robotics or in application such as gesture recognition.

This demo can be used as a kind of test bed for VL53L7CX. It is implement using small development board STM32 M4 Clicker and LightRanger 11 Click sensor board, both produced byMikroelektronika. One should only plug LightRanger 11 click board into the microbus socket on STM32 M4 Clicker board and connect to PC via USB cable. Using LabView simple application is design for sensor data acquisition and visualization. Different sensor parameters can be extracted and evaluated such as distance, signal per SPAD, reflectance, etc. Data can be visualized in raw format (data array), via 3D or Polar plot.

Demo project is built using following ecosystem:

STM32 M4 Clicker development board and LightRanger 11 Click sensor board by Mikroelektronika
STM32CubeIDE 1.14.0 – Integrated Development Environment for STM32 with STM32CubeMX initialization code generator by STMicroelectronics.
VL53L7CX ULD driver - an optimized driver for VL53L7CX
ST-LINK-V2 - programmer for the STM8 and STM32 microcontroller families.

PROJECT FILES&DOCS:

- VL53L7CX datasheet: link
- Firmware source code on github: link
- LabVIEW VI: zip
- Demo video on youtube: link