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A comment on Open Source Time-of-Flight DIY Lidar.

Re:Open Source Time-of-Flight DIY Lidar by dchichkov on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @10:57PM (#22553231)
The original article (in Russian) is very well written. And the author feels like a true "full stack" engineer: high frequency and power electronics, optics, mechanical engineering, micro-controller software development, real time, simultaneous localization and mapping, visualization.
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Re:Open Source Time-of-Flight DIY Lidar by ragebol on Thursday March 12, 2020 @03:54AM (#22554678)
These are the folks that give me impostor syndrome. Given enough time and a project like this, I think I can learn all of that stuff.
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Re:Open Source Time-of-Flight DIY Lidar by carlmr on Thursday March 12, 2020 @05:35AM (#22555145)
The thing is, with Google at your fingertips, you can build almost anything. You don't need to deep dive on all these technologies, but you can probably gather just enough information in a short time.

However it still takes a lot of effort and most of your free time. You have to be extremely driven to complete such a complex project.

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Re:Open Source Time-of-Flight DIY Lidar by myself248 on Thursday March 12, 2020 @07:30AM (#22555668)
Free time in large chunks, was the revelation for me.

I took a serious "staycation" back in December, and wrote about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fgvbsv/staythe...

During those few weeks, I made what seems like a year worth of progress on several projects. Being able to dive in and focus, for hours at a time without worrying that I had other stuff I should be doing, made all the difference in the world.

Rearranging your week to have one "no-chores no-email" evening, when you just use a single large block of time to immerse yourself in a leisure activity, is worth a try.

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Re:Open Source Time-of-Flight DIY Lidar by iliasam on Thursday March 12, 2020 @06:00AM (#22555230)
In fact there is still many kinds of information that could not be found in Google.
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Re:Open Source Time-of-Flight DIY Lidar by dchichkov on Thursday March 12, 2020 @04:52PM (#22561595)
Yes. Almost. There's a complexity threshold over which there is a need for: vision, full stack, deep dive, patience, steady progress over long periods of time. And yes, certain amount of extreme drive to go over the bumps ;).
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Re:Open Source Time-of-Flight DIY Lidar by joshvm on Thursday March 12, 2020 @09:10AM (#22556394)
It's a great project. I built a lidar scanner for my PhD (still have the bits and a £2.5k galvo in a box somewhere). Didn't make the actual lidar unit though.

This has basically become possible due to cheap and accessible TDCs. Both TI and Ams make them now, designed for gas ultrasound flow sensing. Most of the other components have been readily available for a while (not sure about the APDs, but certainly you could buy stuff from Hamamatsu or Thorlabs/Edmund). ROS makes SLAM quite easy if you have a hardware driver, though the utility that the author made for debugging is very neat.

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