Proper connection to power vl6180x sensor

[khaledeisa]

Hi...how are you ...I made aproject using vl6180x with esp8266 nodemcu v3 ....sometimes the power reached it and worked and other times the power didnot reach it and in that time i have to unplug and replug the esp to the pc port or reset the esp until the power reached it....i connect the sensor to 3.3v pin altought I found some projects connect it to 5v but I afraid to do that or it will burn ....so what is the right connections?

I found some projects on google ..they connect it to 5v also like I said sometimes power reached and sometimes not when I connect to 3.3v .....so can I try to connect to 5v maybe i can get stable steady power with no cut off....or how I made sure that sensor can handle 5v and it will not burn if I connect to 5v ?

[John E KVAM]

The board in your top picture has 2.8 clearly written on it. You can push that to 3.3V and the chip will work. Not best for the long term, but for testing it will be OK.

So look around on your MCU board, I'm sure they have 3.3V somewhere.

Next you are going to have to do something with the SHDN line. The chip will not work until that line is high.

Again, for testing, you can connect it to your power rail. You lose the flexibility of being able to reset the sensor, but it will get you going. Best would be to have it hooked to a GPIO that you could control. That way when you reboot, you could reset your sensor before you get going. 

If you got it running once, you have the I2C and ground just fine - so you are most of the way there. 

- john

[khaledeisa]

so what I conclude as a next step is to weld shdn pin with gpio pin like make short between them and to test if it worked ...right ?

[John E KVAM]

As a test, that would be fine. and people do run the system this way.

But depending on the application getting that reset pin to work doesn't cost much and has advantages. One can drop the reset pin when one wants to save a lot of power for instance. It's easier than fiddling with the power rails.

But as a test, go ahead and connect the two. 

- john