VL53L1 Solar Test Method

[joh.5]

Hello.

I am using the VL53L1.

It's fine for indoor lighting.

However, in sunlight, the measurable distance becomes shorter.

Is there any way to test it similar to this sunlight?

Could you please tell me how to test it in relation to sunlight?​

thank you.

[AlexCloned]

Hello.

You mean simulate sunlight influence?

One thing you will surely want to do is geting a luxometer and start correlating results with it's ambient light measures. But let's see what will be John's (ST expert) advice. There are some measures of ambient light you can get from the sensor itself.

My guess is it won't be possible to simulate sunlight effects on ToF sensors with artificial light. And the best tests you can do are those you can perform with real sunlight, making many masurements in different conditions, learn, calibrate and correlate your results.

In order to compare sunlight to artificial light, first approach says sunlight spectrum is much, much, far, wider than the visible light portion. As you may imagine there are lots, insane amounts of energy at a wide range of frequencies that artificial light will not present, and cannot give, for obvious reasons.

image credit: https://reefll.com/index.php?route=information/theory&theo_id=28

Another important approaching consideration is that there is not a unique "sunlight" as it may change daily due to atmospheric filtering, for example.

However these TOF sensors perform a filtering of the incoming light in order to receive only 940 nm, wich is the frequency of their own vcsel. You may be interested in artificially producing that frequency for ambient light testing, with specific IR leds. But finally you will need to calibrate an correlate that light with the actual natural and variable ambient light.

In my experience sunlight influence indoors on a TOF sensor must be calibrated and considered for each specific application. And for outdoor applications... let's wait for next generations of compact lidars, or let's look up out of Class 1 laser products.

I think ST has made a great improvement in a few years since VL6180 was launched. Lately launched sensors are specified up to 5 Klux ambient, wich is pretty impressive. However you will get more than 100 Klux ambient light outdoors in a sunny day and that influence will be very hard or impossible to simulate.