VL53L5CX on Pico W stuck at "Starting up sensor..."

[slabua]

I seem to have no luck in running the vl53l5cx demos on the Pico W, keep getting stuck at

>>> %Run -c $EDITOR_CONTENT

MPY: soft reboot
Starting up sensor...

I have tried different releases, also nuked the pico a few times, but still have the same problem.

If I press Stop, after a while I get this error:

Could not interrupt current process. Please wait, try again or select Stop/Restart!

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
PROBLEM IN THONNY'S BACK-END: Internal error (serial.serialutil.SerialTimeoutException: Write timeout).
See Thonny's backend.log for more info.
You may need to press "Stop/Restart" or hard-reset your MicroPython device and try again.


Process ended with exit code 0.

Once the Pico is in this situation, I have to unplug it and plug it back to be able to access the repl.

[helgibbons]

Have you uploaded the firmware blob to your Pico?

# The VL53L5CX requires a firmware blob to start up.
# Make sure you upload "vl53l5cx_firmware.bin" via Thonny to the root of your filesystem
# You can find it here: https://github.com/ST-mirror/VL53L5CX_ULD_driver/blob/no-fw/lite/en/vl53l5cx_firmware.bin

Step by step instructions are here: https://learn.pimoroni.com/article/micropython-and-vl53l5cx

[slabua]

Have you uploaded the firmware blob to your Pico?

@helgibbons yes I did. (In the case of missing firmware, the error is different). Should I try a particular version of micropython, other than the latest and the one specified in the instructions?

[Gadgetoid]

A quick test with the latest MicroPython build from https://github.com/pimoroni/pimoroni-pico/pull/858

Running from a Pico W Explorer using a Qw'St to Qw'St cable to ensure a good connection, and I've got numbers pouring out.

What's your wiring setup?

Looks like incorrect i2c pins produce:

RuntimeError: VL53L5CX: init error

Which is not what's happening for you, but I thought I'd check just in case.

[helgibbons]

Working OK for me too (with vl53l5cx_demo.py and v1.20.6).

[slabua]

@Gadgetoid @helgibbons I thought to check the md5sum of the binary blob I had, and the one I just downloaded anew for verification~ The non working version had md5sum f396addf82ce7abc6dd56f3997164d5a whilst the working version has 0f6e20ae12db3ec6a37cf3adcb46320a. Not sure why, perhaps the first time it got truncated because the Pico storage was full! It is working properly now, thank you!

[Gadgetoid]

Ooof! That's a nasty way to break things. I wonder if I can validate the binary on-device to avoid this :grimacing: