3D LIDAR DIY Using PulsedLight LIDAR-Lite Device and Servo

LIDAR stands for LIght Detection And Ranging. LIDAR uses laser to measure the distance. LIDAR is capable to do things no many other sensors can do. It can accurately measure distance (tens to hundreds of meters) of objects around, which generates a good picture of surrounding environment. Because of this functionality, LIDAR is a must-have for many self-driving car designs. Many tech hobbyists want to put their fingers on a LIDAR device. However, commercial LIDAR devices are quite expensive and they are usually well above one thousand dollars. Good news is that with availability of cheap laser component like PulsedLight LIDAR-Lite and open source platform like Arduino, now we can make by ourselves a 3D LIDAR scanner with cost well below 1000$. In this blog, I will introduce such a device made by myself.

PulsedLight LIDAR-Lite is used in this device to measure the distance using laser. The maximum distance LIDAR-Lite measures is 40 meters. Two servos, one for vertical direction and another for horizontal direction, are used for scanning the 3D space. Both horizontal and vertical servos can rotate up to 180 degrees. This defines the coverage of this scanner. Arduino platform controls all of them. By connecting Arduino to PC, 3D scan data can be downloaded to PC to control point cloud file. At the same time, PC can power the device through USB. Thus the device does not need to have its own power. Figure below shows how the device looks like.

























When the device scans, it first fixes vertical angle and sweeps horizontally. Then it moves one vertical step and sweeps horizontally again. This Youtube video shows the scanning process

After scanning finished, a point cloud will be generated. Often several point clouds need to be stitched together to generate the whole picture for a building. The residential house model below is generated in that way.

3D model can be produced based on point cloud (Thanks Igor!). Below is the 3D model for the same residential house.

After 3D printing, we have a plastic model of the house. We can view it together with Google street map side-by-side.