Minimum connection requirements of VL53L1X Time of flight

Hi there

I want to use this with my Pi but I don’t have pin 7 (GPIO4) available, at least not without considerable effort! It’s labelled INT on the VL53L1X board. I was under the impression that this module is I2C only and thus only needs two signal lines.

My questions are:
What does the INT pin actually do?
If it’s important, can I use another GPIO pin instead?

Thanks

The board works fine without the INT pin connected. The INT pin can be used to signal that a pre-defined condition is met, but if all you want to do is read the distance then you only need to connect the SDA and SCL signal lines and Vcc + GND for power

@romilly Thanks for the confirmation. I thought that would be the case but couldn’t find any documentation that could tell me more!

I don’t suppose you’d know why my sensor seems a little slow? It takes around 1 second to give me a distance reading.

Is that 1 second for the first read or for every read?

It’s for every read. Since it is occasionally inaccurate I read the value twice and consider it good if the value is within 15mm (enough for my purposes). This dual read takes 2 seconds.

I’ve tried leaving the sensor on all the time thinking that it was the startup delay that was causing the problem, but alas no…

The only thing I wondered was whether the proximity to a perpendicular surface has a negative effect on the reading speed. The sensor is about 50mm above a table and is measuring the distance horizontally between 50 and 750mm.

I’ll have a play tomorrow. ISTR there are timing values on the chip which can be changed, but it’s a long while since I read the datasheet.