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posted by martyb on Thursday February 07 2019, @03:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-see-[what]-you-[did]-*there* dept.

Hackaday:

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.


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  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:29AM (2 children)

    by anubi (2828) on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:29AM (#797606) Journal
    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
    • (Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:50AM

      by anubi (2828) on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:50AM (#797613) Journal
      --
      "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by nishi.b on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:55AM

      by nishi.b (4243) on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:55AM (#797657)

      Their project uses open hardware and software, and seems to be interesting both in range (100m in daylight on natural objects), speed (1000 measurements/s), precision (2 cm) and form factor (small enough to be attached to a drone or robot). There are already components of that type but they were much more expensive when I looked at them for an obstacle-avoiding drone...

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:42AM (1 child)

    by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:42AM (#797610) Homepage Journal

    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: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:22AM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:22AM (#797665) Homepage Journal

    Twelve decimal places last time I looked it up

    UCSC’s senior physics lab offered an experiment involving a rapidly rotating mirror but I didn’t do that one so I don’t know the details.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
  • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday February 07 2019, @03:49PM (2 children)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Thursday February 07 2019, @03:49PM (#797803) Homepage

    " Why, you are asking, have you chosen such a basic controller board to manage the complicated hardware of a LiDAR? Well, my wife likes how small it is and it has a cute name. "

    Ha-HA! What a fucking Nancy-boy. I bet she makes him walk her pug around the block while she entertains the Black Bull living next-door.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:25PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:25PM (#797826)

      Ha-HA! What a fucking Nancy-boy. I bet she makes him walk her pug around the block while she entertains the Black Bull living next-door.

      Stop projecting your own fantasies on others. Cuck.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:07PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:07PM (#797888)

        Nah cuck is way too optimistic for EF

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