“Great sensor. Very sensitive compared with ultrasonic sensor. Very small footprint. Shame you can’t change the address would have used one as a rear sensor on my robot car”
“This thing is pretty neat and fast to respond. It does have issues if there is nothing in its path, as it will randomly jump to something very close, when in fact there is nothing there at all. But if you have something within its range, it detects changes very well.”
“Got this sensor breakout board today and have been playing with it this afternoon. I installed the two required python libraries smbus2 and vl53l1x as described in the software link on a Pi3, and tried the example file graph.py. This worked very well, and I was impressed with the sensitivity and the quick response of the device.
The only problem I have had with the device was in getting to to work with python35 instead of python2.7 Using pip3 to install the required libraries worked form smbus but didn't work properly for the vl53l1x library. After a bit of head scratching I mmaged to solve the problem, and Phil (Gadgetoid) also came up with a solution on the support forum, so I think that he will sort the problem properly soon.
The board is very small (much smaller that an ultrasonic sensor), and it is designed so that you can plug it directly onto 4 specified pins on the Raspberry PI. Do take care when doing this however, as if you use the wrong side you will get 5V rather than 3.3 volts supplied which could have disastrous consequences. I'm marking my pins to prevent accidents!
The board is more expensive than an Ultrasonic Sensor but I think the extra cost is worth the reduction in size and the far superior performance, together with the simple plug in directly to a Raspberry Pi GPIO pins.
You do however have to solder the (supplied) connector on to the board, but there is plenty of room, and it is not very difficult to do.”
