Ascend-8tof — System Documentation¶
Documentation for the Ascend-8tof 360° time-of-flight obstacle-sensing system: a carrier board (STM32H5-family MCU) that reads up to 8× VL53L8CX 8×8 multizone ToF sensors and streams their measurements as a simple ASCII distance stream over UART. Any flight controller or onboard computer can consume it — this documentation uses a ModalAI VOXL2 as the worked example integration because it's the platform we know best, but nothing about the board is VOXL-specific.
8× VL53L8CX ──► 360° carrier board ──UART(ASCII 8×8)──► any host
(8×8 grids) (onboard mux + MCU) (FC / onboard computer)
└─ e.g. VOXL2 + voxl-mapper (example)
Documentation map¶
| # | Document | Contents |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Hardware Overview | Boards, sensor, connectors & pinouts, mechanical mounting |
| 02 | Power | Input voltage & current range, how to power it |
| 03 | Communications — UART Output | The ASCII 8×8 distance stream (the interface you consume) |
| 04 | Firmware | What each firmware variant does and how it's used |
| 05 | Integration (any host) | Host-agnostic recipe + VOXL2/voxl-mapper worked example |
| 06 | Bring-up & Setup | Assemble → power → verify → integrate → troubleshoot |
Key facts at a glance¶
- Sensors: up to 8× VL53L8CX, each an 8×8 zone grid at 15 Hz, forming a 360° ring.
- Reliable range: ~4 m (8×8 mode); ~45° field of view per axis.
- Power: single 5 V input (
J1or USB-C); < 500 mA typical — see Power. - Output: plain ASCII per-channel 8×8 distance matrices over UART at ≈921 600 baud 8N1 — consumable by any host (see Communications).
- Firmware options: a default sensor-stream firmware (ASCII, stable) or an ACO on-board collision-avoidance firmware (MAVLink v2 straight to a flight controller, beta) — see Firmware.