All lasers put out a fairly wide "cone" of light. If you want a narrow beam, you have to put a lens on the end of your laser. Usually the manufacturers provide this automatically. If you want the natural beam, you have to ask for a laser which doesn't have any built-in lens. (Laser light is monochromatic point-source light. It need not be parallel.)

This simple fact is never taught in any grade-school science book, where instead they insist that lasers always put out parallel beams. (No, not HeNe lasers, not diode lasers. Those have a lens, otherwise the natural laser beam would be spreading.) But in this type of sensor, its IR diode-laser is probably being spread out even wider than its naturally-wide, cone-shaped beam.

Look at the ST corp datasheet PDF. This sensor has a 256-pixel camera inside it, ultrahigh-speed pixels. Its microprocessor can disable all but a certain number of them. This lets you program the "view" which the device is actually seeing, with 4X4 (16 pixel) minimum, and 16x16 (256 pixel) maximum.

All lasers put out a fairly wide "cone" of light. If you want a narrow beam, you have to put a lens on the end of your laser. Usually the manufacturers provide this automatically. If you want the natural beam, you have to ask for a laser which doesn't have any built-in lens. (Laser light is monochromatic point-source light. It need not be collimated/parallel light.)

As far as I can determine, the above simple facts are never taught in any grade-school science book, where instead they insist that lasers always put out parallel beams. (No, HeNe lasers don't. They have "confocal" cavities, with sphere-wave output. Neither do diode lasers, with their tiny cavities and wide-diffracted beams. Both have a lens, otherwise the natural laser beam would be spreading.) But in the above type of sensor, its IR diode-laser is probably being spread out even wider than its naturally-wide, cone-shaped beam.

Look at the ST corp datasheet PDF. Basically, this sensor has a 256-pixel camera inside it, ultrahigh-speed pixels. Its microprocessor can disable all but a certain number of them. This lets you program the "view" which the device actually sees, with 4X4 (16 pixel) minimum, and 16x16 (256 pixel) maximum.

All lasers put out a fairly wide field of light. If you want a narrow beam, you have to put a lens on the end of your laser.

This simple fact is never taught in any grade-school science book, where instead they insist that lasers put out parallel beams. (No, not HeNe lasers, not diode lasers. Those have a lens, otherwise the natural laser beam would be spreading.) But in this sensor, the IR laser is probably being spread out even wider than its naturally-wide, cone-shaped beam.

Look at the ST corp datasheet PDF. This sensor has a 256-pixel camera inside it, ultrahigh-speed pixels. Its microprocessor can disable all but a certain number of them. This lets you program the "view" which the device is actually seeing, with 4X4 (16 pixel) minimum, and 16x16 (256 pixel) maximum.

All lasers put out a fairly wide "cone" of light. If you want a narrow beam, you have to put a lens on the end of your laser. Usually the manufacturers provide this automatically. If you want the natural beam, you have to ask for a laser which doesn't have any built-in lens. (Laser light is monochromatic point-source light. It need not be parallel.)

This simple fact is never taught in any grade-school science book, where instead they insist that lasers always put out parallel beams. (No, not HeNe lasers, not diode lasers. Those have a lens, otherwise the natural laser beam would be spreading.) But in this type of sensor, its IR diode-laser is probably being spread out even wider than its naturally-wide, cone-shaped beam.

Look at the ST corp datasheet PDF. This sensor has a 256-pixel camera inside it, ultrahigh-speed pixels. Its microprocessor can disable all but a certain number of them. This lets you program the "view" which the device is actually seeing, with 4X4 (16 pixel) minimum, and 16x16 (256 pixel) maximum.