Adafruit (PID 3317) VL53L0X Time of Flight Distance Sensor – ~30 to 1000mm

The VL53L0X sensor is a good way to add a distance/proximity sensor to your microcontroller project. It would be good for say detecting when a hand moved nearby, or before a robot smacks into a wall, or if your cat was once trying to steal something from your workstation. Depending on your ambient light and object reflectivity, You’ll get about 30mm to 1.2 meters sensing range with ~5% accuracy.

The VL53L0X is a Time of Flight distance sensor like no other you’ve used! The sensor accommodates 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 good for determining 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 a lot more precise and doesn’t have linearity problems or ‘double imaging’ where You’ll’t tell if an object is very far or very close.

The sensor is small and easy to use in any robotics or interactive project. Since it needs 2.8V power and logic we put the little fellow on a breakout board with a regulator and level shifting. You’ll use it with any 3-5V power or logic microcontroller with no worries. Each and every order comes with a small piece of header. Solder the header onto your breakout board with your iron and a few solder and wire it up for instant distance-sensing-success!

Communicating to the sensor is done over I2C with an API written by ST, so its not too hard to port it to your favorite microcontroller. We’ve written a wrapper library for Arduino so You’ll use it with any of your Arduino-compatible boards. Take a look at Adafruit tutorial for code, schematics, diagrams and more!

Make sure this fits by entering your model number.
Up to date in 2020 with 0.7″ x 1.0″ STEMMA QT standard, included 4 mounting holes and 2 STEMMA QT connectors for plug and play
Detects the “time of flight”, or how long the laser light has taken to bounce back to the sensor.
Handles about 50mm to 1200mm of range distance
Able to work with most common microcontrollers or SBCs