[HN Gopher] Raspberry Pi Lidar Scanner
___________________________________________________________________
Raspberry Pi Lidar Scanner
Author : Venn1
Score : 231 points
Date : 2025-04-19 18:53 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| Liftyee wrote:
| It's impressive that the cost of usable LIDAR tech is well within
| the reach of personal projects now. The sensors used on the first
| self-driving cars (from companies like SICK, etc.) likely perform
| much better but the price point of multiple k$ is not really
| viable for experimentation at home.
|
| Not to make everything political, but I wonder how the US tariffs
| will affect electronics-adjacent hobbies. Anecdotally, the
| flashlight community on Reddit has been panicking a little about
| this.
| _blk wrote:
| Short term there's some suffering but while hobbyists are
| definitely more price sensitive, they are also the most
| flexible ones. In production you don't just need one piece, you
| need a steady supply and any change of components affects the
| whole product.
|
| How China/US interact will determine the longer term future of
| that economic relationship but many companies are already
| adjusting because he future is currently uncertain. With the
| free trade agreement with the EU and more producers moving to
| the US I think that it's been a good disruption even if I'm now
| also scrambling to find alternative PCB manufacturers.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| _> With the free trade agreement with the EU_
|
| There is no such agreement.
|
| _> more producers moving to the US_
|
| How many will follow through with these announcements? During
| Trump's first term, announcing huge projects in the US and
| then not following through was a common tactic for companies
| dealing with Trump. Foxconn, for example, announced a new $10
| billion factory in Wisconsin. They made some initial
| investments and stopped when people stopped paying attention.
| Instead of the promised 13.000, they now employ about 1.000
| people there.
|
| And what about all the companies that will have gone out of
| business by then? This mainly affects small companies, which
| are exactly the companies you need for a healthy economy. In
| some cases, they have shipments already paid for that they
| can't accept because they don't have the liquid assets to pay
| the unexpected tariffs, so these companies are now at risk of
| going out of business completely unnecessarily.
|
| It never makes sense to use tariffs for economic reasons. It
| just does not work. Tariffs can make sense for strategic
| reasons if you're willing to take an economic hit to lower
| dependence on other countries for critical industries or
| technologies. However, the idea that taxes are ever "a good
| disruption" for the economy does not bear out.
| otherme123 wrote:
| >It never makes sense to use tariffs for economic reasons.
| It just does not work.
|
| This week two USA companies from which I bought some
| products from Europe sent me an email explaininig how they
| have to rise their prices due to tariffs, as they need to
| import from China for now.
|
| Guess who will be faster: these companies finding an
| alternative supplier in the US that match China quality-
| price, or I finding an alternative supplier from China?
| They just admited that they are buying from China anyways.
| pogue wrote:
| I'm sure most electronic hobby projects are going to be
| financially out of reach for many people for awhile at least.
| Many people who run businesses that are running small homebrew
| projects are struggling, too [1]. But it can be extremely hard
| to tell what might happen with a POTUS who seems to change his
| mind on what tariffs should be implemented on a whim with zero
| thought process put into it, no prior notice when they're going
| to be implemented or removed and then implemented again times
| 500% or whatever.
|
| I know the Hong Kong post also recently blocked outbound
| packages _entirely_ sent to the US [2], so I don 't know how
| that's impacting shipments of tech like this & etc byt would be
| curious to know.
|
| [1] _Arduboy creator says his tiny Game Boy won't survive
| Trump's tariffs_ https://www.theverge.com/news/645555/arduboy-
| victim-trump-ta...
|
| [2] _Hong Kong suspends package postal service to the US after
| Trump's tariff hikes_
| https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/15/business/hong-kong-suspends-p...
| minimalist wrote:
| > Not to make everything political... [proceeds to make a
| political statement]
|
| For what it's worth, this type of Lidar scanner was possible to
| make well over a decade ago with ROS1, a Phidgets IMU, a
| webcam, and a lidar pulled out of a Neato vacuum (the cheapest
| option at the time). This would be around the difficulty of a
| course project for an undergraduate robotics class and could be
| done with less than 200 USD of salvaged parts (not including
| the computer). Hugin was also around over a decade ago.
|
| It's still a nice little project!
| varispeed wrote:
| This seems to be using classic formula -> get trivial, ready
| made component, design 3D printed enclosure and hook it up to
| Raspberry Pi. Instant Hacker News homepage.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _Not to make everything political... [proceeds to make a
| political statement]_
|
| Being all polite and non-political and shit is what brought
| us to this pass.
|
| Never lose an opportunity to make the people who voted for
| the current state of affairs feel isolated, rejected, guilty,
| and generally bad. Being nice to them doesn't work.
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| You're not making me feel isolated, rejected, guilty, or
| generally bad.
|
| You're feeding into the confirmation bias I already have
| about how the opposition thinks, which only serves to
| affirm the choice I made.
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| Yes the opposition thinks evil is evil. The opposition
| also thinks water is wet. Check back here tomorrow for
| more obvious things rational people think.
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| The opposition reductively believes this is an
| existential battle between "good and evil", they're the
| "good", and that's a position from which one can justify
| almost anything to eradicate "evil".
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| How many Supreme Court rulings does it take for a Trump
| supporter to admit the Trump administration is unjust?
| The world may never know.
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| You can always know, if you want to, by actually engaging
| in constructive dialog. Which probably isn't going to
| happen in this thread because it's ostensibly about a
| raspberry pi LiDAR scanner, and thus neither really the
| time nor place.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The MAGA crowd is not even remotely interested in
| 'constructive dialog' and is so far down the hole of
| drinking the kool-aide, constructive dialog with them
| will likely never be possible.
|
| You cannot have constructive dialog about astronomy with
| someone who thinks the sky is made of green and purple
| polkadots because that's what someone told them, and
| dismiss all evidence to the contrary as a massive
| conspiracy.
|
| They don't even believe in democracy or constitutional
| rights - at least, for anyone but them.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| _> You're feeding into the confirmation bias I already
| have about how the opposition thinks_
|
| It's wild that you acknowledge your cognitive bias and
| then blame others for it instead of working on it. If I
| wrote something like that, I hope I would have the
| wherewithal to notice that something is seriously wrong
| with my thinking.
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| We all exhibit cognitive bias.
|
| I'm illustrating how the original behavior feeds
| confirmation bias instead of establishing a basis for
| constructive dialog.
| minimalist wrote:
| Please, I don't want to come on to HN to see politics
| injected into everything. Stay on reddit for that.
|
| I logged in to make a comment regarding something within my
| area of expertise: the technology present in the parent
| link and how this technology has been accessible to
| hobbyists for over 10 years.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| _> I don't want to come on to HN to see politics injected
| into everything_
|
| If it's political to wonder how tariffs impact the cost
| of the project we're discussing, then everything is
| political, and it's pointless to complain about politics
| being "injected into everything."
| sitkack wrote:
| lobsters might your place if you would like to insulate
| yourself to that degree
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I would not consider asking a question about the impact of
| current events on a market segment relevant to the discussion
| topic to be political. The disclaimer is presumably to
| encourage respondents not to drag things in an off topic
| direction. Ironic, considering the outcome.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It's true, a Hokuyo or a Sick that sold for several thousands a
| decade ago is laughably bad compared to something under $100
| from Shenzhen these days. When there's a need there's a way, I
| guess.
|
| I hope they decide to develop some disruptive stereo/structured
| light/tof cameras eventually too, those are still mostly
| overpriced and kinda crap overall.
| godelski wrote:
| This is really cool
|
| One thing I'd suggest, for any hardware product, is that when
| doing your bill of materials to provide links and show estimated
| costs. Sure, these will change but having a rough idea of the
| costs is really helpful, especially when perusing on from things
| like HN. It can be a big difference for someone to decide if they
| want to try it on their own or not. It is the ballpark figures
| that matter, not the specifics.
|
| You did all that research, write it down. If for no one but
| yourself! Providing links is highly helpful because names can be
| funky and helps people (including your future self) know if this
| is the same thing or not. It's always noisy, but these things
| reduce noise. Importantly, they take no time while you're doing
| the project (you literally bought the parts, so you have the link
| and the price). It saves yourself a lot of hassle, not just for
| others. Document because no one remembers anything after a few
| days or weeks. It takes 10 seconds to write it down and 30
| minutes to do the thing all over again, so be lazy and document.
| I think this is one of the biggest lessons I learned when I
| started as an engineer. You save yourself so much time. You just
| got to fight that dumb part in your head that is trying to
| convince you that it doesn't save time. (Same with documenting
| code[0])
|
| Here. I did a quick "15 minute" look. May not be accurate
| Lidar: One of: LD06: $80
| https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803352905216.html
| LD19: $70 https://www.amazon.com/DTOF-D300-Distance-Obstacle-
| Education/dp/B0B1V8D36H STL27L: $160
| https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2726.html Camera and Lens:
| $60 https://www.amazon.com/Arducam-Raspberry-Camera-Distortion-
| Compatible/dp/B0B1MN721K Raspberry Pi 4: $50 NEMA17
| 42-23 stepper: $10 https://www.amazon.com/SIMAX3D-Nema17-Stepper-
| Motor/dp/B0CQLFNSMJ
|
| That gives us $200-$280 before counting the power supply and buck
| converter.
|
| [0] When I wrote the code only me and god understood what was
| going on. But as time marched on, now only god knows.
| juujian wrote:
| Incredible that this is too expense for a company like Tesla.
| xnickb wrote:
| Money better spent on marketing. Like that song about "him
| having a plan".
|
| After all car sales don't drive the stock market. Public
| opinion does.
| dhosek wrote:
| I'll bet a lot of Tesla investors are wishing neither of
| those applied these days.
| derac wrote:
| The requirements for electronics in a car are pretty extreme
| (temp, durability), not that I disagree, but it's not apples
| to oranges.
| cosmie wrote:
| That hasn't stopped Tesla before. They have a track record
| of treating automotive-grade quality standards as optional
| when doing electronics sourcing[1].
|
| As the article notes, Tesla conveniently "fixed" their
| thermals and durability issue that caused by inventing a
| feature called cabin overheat protection and marketing it
| as for people/animals overheating and not for the non-
| automotive-spec electronics in the cabin.
|
| If you can't bring auto quality electronics to the car,
| just change the car so it avoids standard auto thermal
| conditions -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-
| shows...
| theoryofx wrote:
| The lidars used on self-driving vehicles are far more capable
| and far more expensive.
| jsiepkes wrote:
| At this point having "something" would probably even beat
| having nothing.
|
| I guess it's simply a big numbers thing. If you sell lots
| of cars, shaving a couple of hundred dollars of each car
| adds up.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| Not by that much current generation hardware for cars is
| $500-700. And some of the oem expect to bring it price down
| below $200 with the next generation equipment. Now that BYD
| put self driving in almost every car it will supercharge
| adoption and lidar prices might drop even a lot faster with
| economies of scale.
| jpk wrote:
| My (tenuous) understanding is that the challenge with
| lidar isn't necessarily the cost of the sensor(s) but the
| bandwidth and compute required to meaningfully process
| the point cloud the sensors produce, at a rate/latency
| acceptable for driving. So the sensors themselves can be
| a few hundred bucks but what other parts of the system
| also need to be more expensive?
| fragmede wrote:
| What is the cost of a human life worth?
|
| edit: seriously, a $4,000 sensor and an extra, say,
| $3,000 for an upgraded computer module so your car can
| drive itself is just _too_ much too afford?
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| Valuation of a statistical life is $5-10M, depending on
| who you ask[0].
|
| So it's too much to afford, or at least not singularly
| justifiable, unless more than 1 out of every 2000 cars
| kills someone in a way that would be prevented by LIDAR.
|
| 0: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109
| 830152...
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| That seems very unlikely to me. Automotive applications
| are already doing things like depth reconstruction based
| on multiple camera angles and ML inference in real time.
| Why should processing a depth point cloud be
| significantly more difficult than those things?
| jpk wrote:
| The basis for my understanding is a convo with a Google
| engineer who was working on self-driving stuff around
| 10-15 years ago -- not sure exactly when, and things have
| probably changed since then.
|
| At the time they used just a single roof-mounted lidar
| unit. I remember him saying the one they were using
| produced point cloud data on the order of Tbps, and they
| needed custom hardware to process it. So I guess the
| point cloud data isn't necessarily harder to process than
| video, but if the sensor's angular resolution and sample
| rate are high enough, it's just the volume of data that
| makes it challenging.
| sitkack wrote:
| The whole point of lidar is to massively increase the
| amount of ranged data you have to work with.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Makes sense. Maybe doing self driving well just requires
| a ridiculously high bandwidth regardless of data source.
| Related, the human visual system consumes a surprisingly
| large quantity of resources from metabolic to brain real
| estate.
| dx4100 wrote:
| This isn't really something you'd ship in a car though. It's
| cool that we have such a rich ecosystem of devices that this
| can be made "off-the-shelf" - but for production use in a
| car? Not really practical.
| nisa wrote:
| What is the HN opinion on Tesla skipping lidar? Having spent
| some time with computer vision in university I think it's
| insane to skip it - sure stereo reconstruction is powerful
| but lighting conditions have such an impact on results that
| having some robust depth data feels like a no-brainer and
| skipping it feels like malignant neglect.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Karpathy addressed this question at the time:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33397093
|
| Of course he was working for Tesla back then. His opinions
| might be different today given that Elon is no longer signing
| his paycheck.
| qgin wrote:
| They wanted to sell "self driving ready" packages 10 years
| ago, when LiDAR actually was expensive. So at the time, they
| had to make big deal about LiDAR being unnecessary.
| mannyv wrote:
| You could probably harvest these from robot vacuums on
| ebay/goodwill.
| mannyv wrote:
| These = lidar sensors
| politelemon wrote:
| The sketchfab examples are fantastic, to be able to move around
| in a 3D space, like it's some kind of scifi simulation.
|
| The mouse controls are confusing the heck out of me. It shows a
| 'grab' icon but nothing about it grabs as the movement direction
| is the opposite, feels completely unnatural.
| amelius wrote:
| Somewhat related. I'm looking for a cheap way to measure
| distances to approx 10 microns accuracy, over distances on the
| order of 300mm. Any ideas?
| djoldman wrote:
| For what purpose?
|
| https://xyproblem.info/
| aeonik wrote:
| Not OP but I'm in the same market, 3d printing and desktop
| CNC for me.
| RossBencina wrote:
| Answering their question would be more helpful here, even if
| it doesn't solve their problem.
| dheera wrote:
| OCT.
| MoonGhost wrote:
| . Technology | Accuracy | Cost | Comments / Ideal Scenario
|
| 1. Laser Triangulation | ~1-10 um | Medium | Versatile, cost-
| effective, industry-proven.
|
| 2. Linear Optical Encoder| ~1-10 um | Medium | Standard CNC
| solution, reliable if well-mounted.
|
| 3. Confocal Sensors | <1 um | High | Ideal if higher accuracy
| needed, more expensive
|
| 4. Laser Interferometer | <1 um | High | Ideal for lab
| environments, precision metrology, expensive
|
| From GPT-4.5.
|
| It favors triangulation: A laser diode
| projects a narrow beam of laser onto the target surface.
| A high-quality CMOS or CCD detector positioned at an angle to
| the laser measures reflected beam displacement.
| Distance is calculated using geometric triangulation.
|
| Accuracy & Range: Typical range: 10 mm to
| ~1000 mm Typical accuracy: 1-10 microns, easily
| within your required 10 microns
| dheera wrote:
| It's not obvious what the heck this is without reading into it. A
| full 4pi steradian scanner? a 360 degree 1 channel LIDAR? A
| fisheye camera plus some single channel LIDAR plus monocular
| depth estimation networks to cover everything not in the plane of
| the lidar?
|
| It would be great to clarify _what_ it is in the first sentence.
| geor9e wrote:
| its a fisheye camera plus single-channel LiDAR
| donatj wrote:
| Oh hey! This is exactly what I was looking for just a couple
| weeks ago! I've had parts to prototype something roughly
| equivalent to this sitting in my cart on Amazon for a couple
| weeks now, but I've been very uncertain on my choice of actual
| lidar scanner.
|
| I'll have to look into this as a starting point I get back from
| Easter vacation
| badmonster wrote:
| Hi! Thanks for sharing this amazing work. I'm curious about the
| scalability and performance of PiLiDAR when deployed on large-
| scale outdoor datasets. Have you benchmarked it on datasets like
| SemanticKITTI or nuScenes? If so, could you share any insights on
| runtime, memory usage, and how well it generalizes beyond the
| indoor scenes used in your paper?
| nisa wrote:
| I think you (or me, please correct me if that's the case)
| misunderstood something here - this is a diy lidar scanner for
| data acquisition - these datasets are mostly created using rgba
| cameras and the point clouds are later created with some post
| processing step.
|
| So it's not a model for processing data but rather a hardware
| hack for having a real lidar - as in real depth data.
|
| You can throw anything you like on it.
| Animats wrote:
| The actual scanners: [1]
|
| Max range 12 meters. That's when it seems to start to get
| expensive. The light source, filters, and sensors all have to get
| better.
|
| Good enough for most small robots. Maybe good enough for the
| minor sensors on self-driving cars, the ones that cover the
| vehicle perimeter so kids and dogs are reliably sensed. The big
| long-range LIDAR up top is still hard.
|
| [1] https://www.ldrobot.com/
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-04-19 23:00 UTC)