Collaborate Disseminate
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
Continue reading When Will Our Cars Finally Speak the Same Language? DSRC for Vehicles
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
Continue reading Open Source LIDAR Lets You Get Down To The Nitty Gritty
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)
Continue reading Hackaday Podcast Ep3 – Igloos, Lidar, And The Blinking LED Of RF Hacking
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
Continue reading New Part Day: Small, Cheap, and Good LIDAR Modules
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
ICESat-2 will collect 250 times as many elevation measurements as its predecessor, ICESat. Continue reading NASA Will Measure Polar Ice Cover Down to the Centimeter with Lasers From Space
Sometimes the best you can say about a project is, “Nice start.” That’s the case for this as-yet awful DIY 3D scanner, which can serve both as a launching point for further development and a lesson in what not to do.
Don’t get us wrong, we have plenty of respect for [bitluni] and for the fact that he posts his failures as well as his successes, like composite video and AM radio signals from an ESP32. He used an ESP8266 in this project, which actually uses two different sensors: an ultrasonic transducer, and a small time-of-flight laser chip. Each was …read more
Continue reading Fail Of The Week: How Not To Make A 3D Scanner
[JRodrigo]’s xLIDAR project is one of those ideas that seemed so attractively workable that it went directly to a PCB prototype without doing much stopping along the way. The concept was to mount a trio of outward-facing VL53L0X distance sensors to a small PCB disk, and then turn that disk with a motor and belt while taking readings. As the sensors turn, their distance readings can be used to paint a picture of the immediate surroundings (at least within about 1 meter, which is the maximum range of the VL53L0X.)
The hardware is made to be accessible and has a …read more
Continue reading xLIDAR Is A Merry-Go-Round Of Time-Of-Flight Sensors
LIDAR is a very exciting technology that is only just now starting to become accessible to the DIY market. Think radar, but with lasers. There’s a few different modules starting to pop up for just a few hundred dollars. But what is one to do with a LIDAR module? Well, [David] decided to build a room scanner with his Garmin LIDAR Lite, and it’s a wonderful sight to behold.
The scanner consists of a rotating platform, which is driven by a stepper motor. The platform then contains a second motor which runs a tilt axis, upon which the LIDAR is …read more
We don’t have to tell you that drones are all the rage. But while new commercial models are being released all the time, and new parts get released for the makers, the basic technology used in the hardware hasn’t changed in the last few years. Sure, we’ve added more sensors, increased computing power, and improved the efficiency, but the key developments come in the software: you only have to look at the latest models on the market, or the frequency of Git commits to Betaflight, Butterflight, Cleanflight, etc.
With this in mind, for a Hackaday prize entry [int-smart] is working …read more
Continue reading Simple Quadcopter Testbed Clears The Air For Easy Algorithm Development