Replacing VL53L0X Time-of-Flight Distance Sensors on WallE3 with VL53L1X

Posted 21 April 2023

This material was an addition to my earlier ‘More ‘WallE3_Complete_V2’ Testing‘ post, but I decided it deserved its own post.

As one result of my recent ‘field’ tests with ‘WallE3_Complete_V2’, I discovered that the maximum distance capability (approximately 120cm) of my VL53L0X sensors was marginal for some of the tracking cases. In particular, when the robot passes an open doorway on the tracking side, it attempts to switch to the ‘other’ wall, if it can find one. However, If the robot is tracking the near wall at a 40cm offset, and the other wall is more than 120cm further away (160cm total), then the robot may or may not ‘see’ the other wall during an ‘open doorway’ event. I could probably address this issue by setting the tracking offset to 50cm vs 40cm, but even that might still be marginal. This problem is exacerbated by any robot orientation changes while tracking, as even a few degrees of ‘off-perpendicular’ orientation could cause the distance to the other wall to fall outside the sensor range – bummer.

I had the thought that ST Micro’s latest brainchild, the VL53L5CX sensor (investigated in this post) might be the answer, and would radically simplify the ‘parallel find’ problem as well. Unfortunately, the reality turned out to be somewhat less than spectacular. See the ’20 March 2023′ update to the above post for details.

Noodling around the STMicro site, I ran across the VL53L1X, which appears to offer about twice the maximum range than the VL53L0X; could this be the answer to my range issue? A quick check in my ‘sensors’ drawer didn’t turn up any, so I’m now on the prowl for a source for VL53L1X units. I Found a couple of VL53L1X units on eBay that I can get in a couple of days – yay!

Then I searched for and found a source for VL53L1X units that have roughly the same form factor and pinout as my current VL53L0X units, which should allow me to use a modified form of the 3-element array (one for each side) PCB I created earlier (see this post). Then I opened up the PCB design in DipTrace, modified it as required to get the pinouts correct, and then sent the design off to JLPCB for manufacture. With any luck, the PCB and the VL53L1X sensors should get here at about the same time!

After the usual number of errors, I was able to get a 3-element array of VL53L1X units working with a Teensy 3.5 on a plugboard, and then I moved the sensors to my newly-arrived V2 PCB’s, as shown in the following photo:

3-element array of VL53L1X sensors on new PCB

As shown in the photo, the array was pointed diagonally up toward the ceiling about 2.4-2.5m away, while the test was running, I waved my hand rapidly back and forth through the ‘beam’, to see how quickly the sensors could react. As shown in the following Excel plot, the answer is “pretty darned quickly!”.

My wife and I spent last week in Gatlinburg, Tenn. For those of you who have never heard of Gatlinburg, it is a small town nestled in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. For most people, it is known for it’s beautiful scenery, great shopping, and its colorful history. However, for us bridge buffs, it is famous as the host of a regional bridge tournament, one of the largest in the nation.

There is a fair amount of down time between games, so I brought my VL53L1X test setup along to play with. This morning I was able to test my two new 3-element VL53L1X arrays connected to a Teensy 3.5 on a plugboard as shown in the following photo:

two 3-element VL53L1X arrays, 5 of which worked fine

I used my ‘VL53L1X_Pololu_V1.ino’ (shown in it’s entirety below) to test the arrays.

This program instantiates an array of VL53L1X objects named ‘sensors’, and the user initializes this array with the pin numbers attached to the XSHUT input of each device. In its original ‘out of the box’ configuration, the program expects three sensors to be attached to the default I2C port (Wire0), with XSHUT lines connected to controller pins 4, 5, & 6. As I described earlier in my 15 April update, I first modified the program to use Teensy 3.5 pins 32, 31, & 30 and verified that all three sensors were recognized and produced good data. Then I added a second 3-element sensor array on the same I2C bus, with XSHUT pins tied to Teensy 3.5 pins 4,5, & 6. Unfortunately, the program refused to recognize any of the sensors on the second array. So, I used the ‘sensorCount’ value and the contents of the xshutPins[sensorCount] array to selectively disable individual sensors on the second array, and I was able to determine that one of the VL53L1X sensors on the second array wasn’t responding for some reason, but the other two worked find. So, now I know that the Wire1 I2C bus on the Teensy 3.5 can handle at least 5 sensors, with no external pullup resistors – yay!

The next step was to move one of the arrays to Wire2 to more closely emulate the current situation on the robot. Here is the completed code, with only two of the three elements in the second array being utilized:

Here is a short section of the output from the above program:

From the above telemetry I have picked out the following lines:

Note that in the above there are two sensors set for 0X2A and two for 0X2B. This works, because the first three sensors (0, 1, & 2) are on the Wire1 I2C bus, and the remaining two (also sensors 0 & 1) are on the Wire2 bus. This setup essentially duplicates the dual 3-element sensor arrays on WallE3.

After getting the above program working with Wire1 & Wire2, I used it to modify my previous Teensy_VL53L0X_I2C_Slave_V4.ino program to use the new VL53L1X sensors. The new program , ‘Teensy_VL53L1X_I2C_Slave_V4.ino’ is shown in it’s entirety below:

22 April 2023 Update:

We got back home from Gatlinburg last night, and so this morning I decided to verify my theory that one of my six VL53L1X distance sensors was indeed defective. I have a pretty healthy skepticism about blaming hardware failures in a hardware/software system; in fact my motto is “Hardware never fails” (it does occasionally fail, but much much less often than a software issue causing the hardware to LOOK like it fails).

So, I loaded my one-sensor VL53L1X_Demo.ino example onto the Teensy 3.5 and used Wire0 (pins 18/19) to drive just this one sensor. Naturally it worked fine, as shwon below:

Well, as I suspected, the hardware seems OK so now I have to figure out why it didn’t respond properly in my six-element setup.

I replaced the ‘XSHUT’ wire from Teensy pin 5 to the sensor, but this did not solve the problem. I also tried driving the XSHUT line HIGH instead of letting it float, but no joy. Next I tried switching the suspect sensor with the one right next to it, to see if the problem follows the sensor. After several iterations, it now appears that the problem stays with the sensor associated with whatever sensor’s XSHUT pin is connected to Teensy 3.5 pin 5, or possibly with the 3-element array PCB itself.

I moved the XSHUT wire on T3.5 pin 5 to T3.5 pin 9, and re-ran the program. Same problem. Replaced the jumper wire from T3.5 pin 9 to the sensor; no change.

So now it is looking more likely that there is a problem on the PCB associated with the sensor socket closest to the T3.5-to-PCB cable. A glance at the back of the sensor socket revealed the problem – some idiot (whose name is being withheld to protect the author) had failed to solder three of the four socket pins to the PCB – oops!

How to waste a week of work – forget to solder three out of four socket pins to the PCB!

After fixing my solder (or lack thereof) screwup, everything started working – yay! Just as an aside, I claim credit for starting this troubleshooting effort with the statement “Hardware Never Fails”, which turned out to indeed be the case. Small comfort, but I’ll take it!

After confirming that both 3-element arrays were working properly, I added the rear sensor VL53L1X as a fourth sensor on Wire2, with XSHUT connected to pin 8. This mimics the hardware arrangement implemented on WallE3. Here’s a photo showing the plugboard setup:

In the above image, the ‘rear’ sensor is show standing upright on the right side of the plugboard.

And some typical output:

At this point I have the above ‘VL53L1X_Pololu_V1.ino’ program doing exactly what I want – handling seven different VL53L1X sensors on two different I2C busses. Now I need to port the necessary changes into my ‘Teensy_7VL53L1X_I2C_Slave_V1.ino’ program, which itself is a clone of ‘Teensy_7VL53L0X_I2C_Slave_V4.ino’, the program currently running on WallE3.

After a few minor missteps, I believe I now have ‘Teensy_7VL53L1X_I2C_Slave_V1.ino’ working with all seven VL53L1X sensors. Here’s the complete program:

And a sample of the output:

At this point the only remaining step is to physically swap out the sensors currently on WallE3 with the new ones, and reprogram the 2nd deck Teensy 3.5 with the new ‘Teensy_7VL53L1X_I2C_Slave_V1.ino’. With any luck at all, WallE3 won’t even notice anything has changed, except he will now be getting valid side/rear distance values from much farther away. We’ll see!

26 April 2023 Update:

After carefully installing all seven sensors (two 3-element arrays plus a rear-facing one) on WallE3’s second deck, and running the same Pololu example program on the second-deck Teensy 3.5, I discovered that one of the sensors was initializing properly, but was reporting ‘0 TIMEOUT’ for the distance – major bummer! After removing the left-hand sensor array from WallE3 and re-attaching it to my free-standing test Teensy 3.5, I eventually found that the problem was a broken connection INSIDE one of the 4-pin female headers on the PCB – yikes!

Anyway, got that fixed, re-attached the left-hand array to WallE3, and ran the Pololu program to verify proper operation, and now all seven element report believable distances, as shown below. In the output below, I used my hand to block the right, left, and rear sensors to verify proper performance.

Next, I loaded my new ‘Teensy_7VL53L1X_I2C_Slave_V1.ino’ program on WallE3’s second-deck Teensy 3.5 and verified that all seven sensors were operating properly, as shown in the output below:

The photo below shows both 3-element arrays mounted on WallE3. The rear sensor is hidden behind the red support tower:

The next step was to load ‘WallE3_Complete_V2.ino’ onto the Teensy 3.5 main controller and verify that it could indeed get distance information from the second-deck Teensy 3.5 VL53L1X array controller. Here’s some output from WallE3_Complete_V2.ino in ‘DISTANCES_ONLY’ mode. Again I used my hand to block the left, right, and rear sensors to verify proper operation.

The next step is to re-implement the distance compensation algorithms for each sensor. For the VL53L0X sensors, this was done using the procedure described in this post. The procedure involves taking sensor readings at several known distances, and using the data to develop a correction expression for each sensor.

To make this happen, I had to first disable the current compensation scheme for all the sensors. Then I ran ‘WallE3_Complete_V2.ino’ again in Distances Only mode to get the data needed to develop the compensation expressions.

Stay tuned,

Frank

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