Help needed: with VL53L4CD on ESP32-S3 (T-DISPLAY) as a water level in a small 10L tank.

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oh23
 
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Help needed: with VL53L4CD on ESP32-S3 (T-DISPLAY) as a water level in a small 10L tank.

Post by oh23 »

Hello all,

I need some help with a project I'm working on trying to help a disabled elderly family member. basically he have a 600L aquarium that stands on a cabinet, inside the cabinet are all of the aquarium support systems and one of them is small rectangular 10-15L that holds clean water with some nutrient/fertilizers mixed in ( can't remember exactly the name of this tank ) and every once in a while a small amount of water 100/300ml from this tank gets pumped up to the aquarium. its challenging for him to get up every time to check how full or empty the smaller tank is since he needs to squat/bend over to open the cabinet doors which he really having hard time to do. so I suggested that maybe I can help and put some kind of a sensor that will measure the water level ( in % ) in the tank and show it on a small tft display that I can mount on the outside of the cabinet door. that way he doesn't need to unnecessarily go to the cabinet and check, only when actually that tank reads low and needs to be filled up.

I'm no experience coder and the whole sensoring application world is very new to me.



I actually experimented in the last 2-3 weeks with some sensors like the HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor and the waterproof A02YYUW since I could find some very informative YouTube tutorials. it worked a bit but after very short time both of the sensors started to give inaccurate reading and one of them even stopped completely working.



so after more indept searching I came to find out abut the VL53L5CX and the VL53L4CD sensors that would perfectly fit my purpose, after reading a bit further I understood that the VL53L4CD would fit my needs better.

I used a LILYGO ESP32-S3R8 since it has a nice big 1.9" TFT display ON BOARD.

What I kindly want to ask, is if someone can help me out with a step by step of what i need for this project to work. I really don't need any fancy wifi/autmatic/blynk or any kind of extra applications just a straight up water level measurements that show up on the tft display as PERCENTAGE % units. I know that some changes needs to be done to the sample code the ST provides for that sensor and that is basically where I need the help I'm looking for.

I'm working with platformio ( also have Arduino IDE installed but found it easier for me to work with platformio ).

I'm basically trying to recreate the ST YouTube video "Liquid Level Monitoring using ST’s Time-of-Flight: VL53L5CX"

but instead of output readings in mm id like a water level in %s.

hopefully, I've explained myself in a decent way since English is not my first language.

I'd greatly appreciate anyone who can work with me on this one as I'm pretty much ready to quit on this.

thank you in advance,

Omer

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oh23
 
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Re: Help needed: with VL53L4CD on ESP32-S3 (T-DISPLAY) as a water level in a small 10L tank.

Post by oh23 »

some additional info :

distance of the sensor when the container is empty is 30cm

distance of the sensor from water level when tank is full is 2cm

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tylersuard
 
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Re: Help needed: with VL53L4CD on ESP32-S3 (T-DISPLAY) as a water level in a small 10L tank.

Post by tylersuard »

Hello. I am having issues with getting the VL53L4CD to work on my ESP32-S3, and nobody at Adafruit is responding. Were you able to get the two modules to communicate?

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adafruit_support_carter
 
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Re: Help needed: with VL53L4CD on ESP32-S3 (T-DISPLAY) as a water level in a small 10L tank.

Post by adafruit_support_carter »

@tylersuard Your other threads have been responded to:
viewtopic.php?p=974162#p974162
viewtopic.php?p=974158#p974158

@oh23 We can't provide complete step-by-step instructions for application specific setups. There are lots of potential options for both hardware and software for how to go about this. The VL53L4CD has a nominal range of 0.1cm to 130cm, so should work for your 2-30cm range. For controlling and displaying the VL53L4CD range information, maybe a Feather with a built in TFT display? Check out these options:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/5300
https://www.adafruit.com/product/5483
https://www.adafruit.com/product/5345

The STEMMA QT connector is really just I2C in a convenient connector. More info here:
https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing- ... -stemma-qt

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