Tag Archives: LIDAR

34C3: The First Day is a Doozy

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It’s 5 pm, the sun is slowly setting on the Leipzig conference center, and although we’re only halfway through the first day, there’s a ton that you should see. We’ll report some more on the culture of the con later — for now here’s just the hacks.

Electric Car Charging Stations: Spoofing and Reflashing

Electric autos are the future, right? Well, for now we need to figure out how to charge them. All across Germany, charging stations are popping up like dandelions. How do they work? Are they secure? [Mathias Dalheimer] bought a couple loading stations, built himself a car …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: MappyDot, a Micro Smart LiDAR Sensor

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[Blecky]’s entry to the Hackaday Prize is MappyDot, a tiny board less than a square inch in size that holds a VL53L0X time-of-flight distance sensor and can measure distances of up to 2 meters.

MappyDot is more than just a breakout board; the ATMega328PB microcontroller on each PCB provides filtering, an easy to use  I2C interface, and automatically handles up to 112 boards connected in a bus. The idea is that one or a few MappyDots can be used by themselves, but managing a large number is just as easy. By dotting a device with multiple MappyDots pointing in different …read more

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Digitize Your Room With LIDAR

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What’s the best way to image a room? A picture? Hah — don’t be so old-fashioned! You want a LIDAR rig to scan the space and reconstruct it as a 3D point map in your computer.

Hot on the heels of [Saulius Lukse]’s scanning thermometer, he’s replaced the thermal camera on their pan/tilt setup with a time-of-flight (TOF) camera — a Garmin LIDAR — capable of 500 samples per second and end up scanning their room in a mere fifteen minutes. Position data is combined with the ranging information to produce a point cloud using Python. Open that file in …read more

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New Part Day: Very Cheap LIDAR

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Self-driving cars are, apparently, the next big thing. This thought is predicated on advancements in machine vision and cheaper, better sensors. For the machine vision part of the equation, Nvidia, Intel, and Google are putting out some interesting bits of hardware. The sensors, though? We’re going to need LIDAR, better distance sensors, more capable CAN bus dongles, and the equipment to tie it all together.

This is the cheapest LIDAR we’ve ever seen. The RPLIDAR is a new product from Seeed Studios, and it’s an affordable LIDAR for everyone. $400 USD gets you one module, and bizarrely $358 USD gets …read more

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New Part Day: Very Cheap LIDAR

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Self-driving cars are, apparently, the next big thing. This thought is predicated on advancements in machine vision and cheaper, better sensors. For the machine vision part of the equation, Nvidia, Intel, and Google are putting out some interesting bits of hardware. The sensors, though? We’re going to need LIDAR, better distance sensors, more capable CAN bus dongles, and the equipment to tie it all together.

This is the cheapest LIDAR we’ve ever seen. The RPLIDAR is a new product from Seeed Studios, and it’s an affordable LIDAR for everyone. $400 USD gets you one module, and bizarrely $358 USD gets …read more

Continue reading New Part Day: Very Cheap LIDAR→

Hackaday Prize Entry: Cheap, Open LiDAR

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[adam] is a caver, meaning that he likes to explore caves and map their inner structure. This is still commonly done using traditional tools, such as notebooks (the paper ones), tape measure, compasses, and inclinometers. [adam] wanted to upgrade his equipment, but found that industrial LiDAR 3D scanners are quite expensive. His Hackaday Prize entry, the Open LIDAR, is an affordable alternative to the expensive industrial 3D scanning solutions out there.

LiDAR — Light Detection And Ranging —  is the technology that senses the distance between a sensor and an object by reflectively measuring the time of flight of a …read more

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Hacklet 113 – New Robots

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I start each day checking out the new and updated projects over on Hackaday.io. Each day one can find all manner of projects – from satellites to machine vision to rockets. One type of project which is always present are robots- robot arms, educational ‘bots, autonomous robots, and mobile robots. This week’s Hackaday.io had a few great robot projects show up on the “new and updated” page, so I’m using the Hacklet to take a closer look.

We start with [Jack Qiao] and Autonomous home robot that does things. [Jack] is building a robot that can navigate his home. He’s …read more

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In Soviet Russia, DIY Laser Rangefinder Scan YOU!!

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Yakov Smirnoff used to say, “In America, you can always find a party. In Soviet Russia, Party finds YOU!!” Only here, it’s a laser rangefinder.

In this project (automatic translation), [iliasam] makes his own scanning laser rangefinder, like the ones that we’ve seen in fancy vacuum cleaners. But he does it from scratch.

While this sort of thing is easy if you have a webcam and a ton of processing power to throw at it, [iliasam] takes the hard way out — measuring the parallax of the reflected spot through a lens on a linear image sensor (which renders as …read more

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