Compatible Distance Senor of 5m or plus

[username_tann]

Hi all,

I'm fairly new to microcontrollers and I just wanted to make my own little camera security system at home. I have ESP32-WROOM-32D module. I was able to connect to my network and send simple UDP packets through sockets using ESP-IDF. My next step is to get a distance sensor to interface with my MCU and now send that piece of data over to my local server. However, I'm a little lost about which distance sensor to use. So far, I noticed VL53L1X ToF sensor offers a reasonable distance range but it comes with a driver, and the datasheet for it doesn't expose registers in detail for me to write my own i2c configuration protocol that would've been specified in the datasheet. ST provides their own driver for it and recommends using it for the proper functionality of the sensor. I have no problem with using their driver but it states that it is a driver for STM32 MCU which is based on ARM microprocessors. Should that be a problem? Other distance sensors are ultrasonic based but their distance coverage is not ideal for my use case. A lot of these sensors come with Arduino support but I don't want to use that since I'm using ESP-IDF and want to stick to this.

I was hoping to be able to look at a sensor's datasheet see which registers need to be configured and then use it (sort of like doing a novice driver for the sensor). However, I'm left with either driver provided by ST or Arduino-based support. This is a hobby project and I want to try and do much of it as myself without using drivers.

I understand that I may have not used proper vocabulary so please feel free to correct me.