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
[0] When I wrote the code only me and god understood what was going on. But as time marched on, now only god knows.
Incredible that this is too expense for a company like Tesla.
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.
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.
The requirements for electronics in a car are pretty extreme (temp, durability), not that I disagree, but it's not apples to oranges.
The lidars used on self-driving vehicles are far more capable and far more expensive.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
The whole point of lidar is to massively increase the amount of ranged data you have to work with.
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?
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/S109830152...
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.
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.
I’ll bet a lot of Tesla investors are wishing neither of those applied these days.
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.
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.
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?
OCT.
For what purpose?
Answering their question would be more helpful here, even if it doesn't solve their problem.
Not OP but I'm in the same market, 3d printing and desktop CNC for me.
You could probably harvest these from robot vacuums on ebay/goodwill.
These = lidar sensors
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
its a fisheye camera plus single-channel LiDAR
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.
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...
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
lobsters might your place if you would like to insulate yourself to that degree
>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."
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.
>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.
We all exhibit cognitive bias.
I’m illustrating how the original behavior feeds confirmation bias instead of establishing a basis for constructive dialog.
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.
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”.
How many Supreme Court rulings does it take for a Trump supporter to admit the Trump administration is unjust? The world may never know.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
>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.