VL53L1X & a Raspberry Pico

I've had an idea for checking the height of a equipment during its movement for some time now and thought the small form factor of the pico + the VL53L1X sensor would be an ideal candidate. So after much searching and trial/error it seemed it wasnt possible until i stumbled across a few threads in the micro-python forum and the openmv github site and i now have a working setup;

The sensor is wired as follows;

In order to get it working you'll need to copy the vl53l1x.py file from;

• https://github.com/openmv/openmv/blob/master/scripts/libraries/vl53l1x.py

then edit it and replace

• search & replace all pyb with machine
• search & replace all delay with lightsleep

Or you can download the version from my github page https://github.com/drakxtwo/vl53l1x_pico/tree/main

You can test to see if a device is found by;

from machine import I2C
from vl53l1x import VL53L1X
import time

sda=machine.Pin(4)
scl=machine.Pin(5)
i2c=machine.I2C(0,sda=sda,scl=scl,freq=400000)
print('scanning bus..')
devices = i2c.scan()
if len(devices) == 0:
  print("No i2c device !")
else:
  print('i2c devices found:',len(devices))
  
for device in devices:  
    print("Decimal address: ",device," | Hexa address: ",hex(device))

Assuming we can found a sensor then the code to read from it is;

from machine import I2C
from vl53l1x import VL53L1X
import time

i2c = I2C(0)
distance = VL53L1X(i2c)

while True:
    print("range: mm ", distance.read())
    time.sleep_ms(50)

with output as follows;

MicroPython v1.14 on 2021-02-05; Raspberry Pi Pico with RP2040
Type "help()" for more information.
>>> %Run -c $EDITOR_CONTENT
range: mm  174
range: mm  174
range: mm  172
range: mm  172
range: mm  172
range: mm  172

Thats as far as i have got, the original pimoroni library allowed for multiplexing the sensors, changing range etc i dont know if thats possible, i'm pleased i got this far!