for the VL53L1, VL53L3 and VL53L4 the histogram bins are 20cm. It has to do with the clock speed of the device. 20 bins at 20 cm is = 4Meters. The 24 bin range extends this a bit.
If I were you, I'd only look at the first 20bins and consider the max as 4Meters.
It took us years to extropolate that data and get the longer range.
The first bin containing a number of counts is where your target is. But that only gets you to 20cm accuracy.
But consider the case where the target is exactly at 80cm. Bins 0 and 1 will contain ambient light levels and bin 2 will contain a full-height signal. As the laser is on for 2micro seconds, bin 3 will also contain a full hight signal.
Now consider a target at 90 cm. Bin 2 will contain only a half height signal, bin 3 will contain a full height signal and bin 4 will contain a half-height signal.
As the target moves farther away, the initial bin will get lower until it disappears completely.
Use the ratio of the initial bin and the next one to determine where in the bin the target is.
And please note, this is the ideal case. The laser does not fire at exactly the start of a bin and it does not turn off exactly after 2microseconds. So there is going to be an offset.
Compare the range we calculate to the bin structure to detemine that offset.
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