The SparkFun Qwiic Proximity Sensor is a great, qualitative proximity (up to 20 cm) and light sensor. This hookup guide covers a few examples to retrieve basic sensor readings.
A living hookup guide with three different machine learning applications that will help you around the home as well as teach the basics of taking the examples of machine learning you find in the DLI Course and working towards deploying those projects beyond an example in Jupyter Notebooks!