LIDAR System Isn’t Just A Rangefinder Anymore

For any project there’s typically a trade-off between quality and cost,as higher quality parts, more features, or any number of aspects of a project can drive its price up. It seems as though [iliasam] has managed to avoid this paradigm entirely with his project. His new LIDAR system knocks it …read more

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Archaeologists use laser tech to reveal secrets of 100-km Maya road

Archaeologists have used laser technology to map a 100-km (62-mile) Maya stone road that could have been built 1,300 years ago to help with the invasion of an isolated city in modern-day Mexico. The ancient highway is thought to have been constructed a… Continue reading Archaeologists use laser tech to reveal secrets of 100-km Maya road

Subterranean Uses for LIDAR: Cave Surveys

LIDAR has gained much popularity as a means for self-driving cars to survey the space around them. At their most basic, LIDAR is a surveying method that uses lasers to paints the space around the sensors and assembles the distances measured from reflected light into a digital three-dimensional representation. That’s …read more

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Cane-based companion robot supports mobility-impaired with a friendly touch

Taking inspiration from the traditional cane, a team of researchers from Columbia Engineering in New York has come up with a LiDAR-enabled robotic assistant which offers light-touch support for the mobility-impaired. Dubbed Canine, the device… Continue reading Cane-based companion robot supports mobility-impaired with a friendly touch

When Will Our Cars Finally Speak the Same Language? DSRC for Vehicles

At the turn of the 21st century, it became pretty clear that even our cars wouldn’t escape the Digital Revolution. Years before anyone even uttered the term “smartphone”, it seemed obvious that automobiles would not only become increasingly computer-laden, but they’d need a way to communicate with each other and …read more

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Open Source LIDAR Lets You Get Down To The Nitty Gritty

If you’re unfamiliar with LIDAR, you might have noticed it sounds a bit like radar. That’s no accident – LIDAR is a backronym standing for “light detection and ranging”, the word having initially been created as a combination of “light” and “radar”. The average person is most likely to have come into contact with LIDAR at the business end of a police speed trap, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Unruly is the open source LIDAR project you’ve been waiting for all along.

Unlike a lot of starter projects, LIDAR isn’t something you get into with a couple …read more

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Hackaday Podcast Ep3 – Igloos, Lidar, And The Blinking LED Of RF Hacking

It’s cold outside! So grab a copy of the Hackaday Podcast, and catch up on what you missed this week.

Highlights include a dip into audio processing with sox and FFMPEG, scripting for Gmail, weaving your own carbon fiber tubes, staring into the sharpest color CRT ever, and unlocking the secrets of cheap 433 MHz devices. Plus Elliot talks about his follies in building an igloo while Mike marvels at what’s coming out of passive RFID sensor research.

And what’s that strange noise at the end of the podcast?

Direct Download (59.2 MB MP3)

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New Part Day: Small, Cheap, and Good LIDAR Modules

Fully autonomous cars might never pan out, but in the meantime we’re getting some really cool hardware designed for robotic taxicab prototypes. This is the Livox Mid-40 Lidar, a LIDAR module you can put on your car or drone. The best part? It only costs $600 USD.

The Livox Mid-40 and Mid-100 are two modules released by Livox, and the specs are impressive: the Mid-40 is able to scan 100,000 points per second at a detection range of 90 m with objects of 10% reflectivity. The Mid-40 sensor weighs 710 grams and comes in a package that is only 88 …read more

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Hackaday Links: January 20, 2019

Let’s say you’re an infosec company, and you want some free press. How would you do that? The answer is Fortnite. Yes, this is how you hack Fortnite. This is how to hack Fortnite. The phrase ‘how to hack Fortnite’ is a very popular search term, and simply by including that phrase into the opening paragraph of this post guarantees more views. This is how you SEO.

Lasers kill cameras. Someone at CES visited the AEye booth, snapped a picture of an autonomous car at AEye’s booth, and the LIDAR killed the sensor. Every subsequent picture had a purple spot …read more

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