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 of salvaged LEDs and an Arduino Uno. We're talking about measuring the time it takes light to travel relatively short distances, so plenty of specialised components are required. There's a pulsed laser diode, and a special hypersensitive avalanche photodiode that operates at up to 130 V. These are combined with precision lenses and filters to ensure operation at the maximum range possible. Given that light can travel 300,000 km in a second, to get any usable resolution, a microcontroller alone simply isn't fast enough to cut it here. A specialized time-to-digital converter (TDC) is used to time how long it takes the light pulse to return from a distant object. Unruly's current usable resolution is somewhere in the ballpark of 10 mm – an impressive feat.
Maybe now, at last, we can build robots to help us find our keys.
(Score: -1, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:42AM (1 child)
I owned an airline (very successful). And I've been to many airports. When the planes take off, we always hear them. Some of those are very loud. They can do a real number on your ears. But when the planes stop, it gets quiet. And an airport, so many times, they have the Radar Dish. Spinning around all the time. I'm familiar with that one. I don't hear it. And maybe it's not totally silent. But it's quiet. So when they say, "oh, the LIDAR sounds like Radar," possibly they mean it's very quiet.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Thursday February 07 2019, @05:04PM
I owned an airline (very successful).
Hadn't heard of that one before.
I wonder is any of us can guess how well it turned out!
The high debt forced Trump to default on his loans, and ownership of the company was turned over to creditors. The Trump Shuttle ceased to exist in 1992 when it was merged into a new corporation, Shuttle Inc. [time.com]