Adafruit
Garmin LIDAR-Lite Optical Distant Sensor - V3
You've heard about the sensors in the news, when used in self-driving cars, and now you can have your own! Garmin's LIDAR-Lite V3 is the ideal high-performan...
You've heard about the sensors in the news, when used in self-driving cars, and now you can have your own! Garmin's LIDAR-Lite V3 is the ideal high-performance (but compact) optical distant measurement sensor solution for drone, rovers, robots, or interactive project. Garmin makes high quality sensors, they're renowned for their GPS sensors, and these LIDARs are nice and high quality devices.
You can measure up to 40 meters away with laser-based sensor that draws only 130 mA during an acquisition. You can easily adjust between accuracy, operating range and measurement time using the I2C command set.
- Compact, lightweight with low power consumption
- Communication via I2C (recommended and PWM
- True laser distance measurements - many sensors advertised as LIDAR are not really LIDARs
- Example library code available for Arduino (C/C++) and CircuitPython/Python.
Note this LIDAR doesn't rotate around, it's just for measuring 'straight ahead', but it's really light and compact in comparison so when you don't need something that spins around this is a superior LIDAR.
You will need a microcontroller or microcomputer to connect to the I2C pins to read the distance values. In theory Garmin says you can take measurements at up to 500 Hz but that depends on how accurate you want the measurements. We got ~150Hz for most of our use cases.
Jargon buster
Plain-language definitions for the technical terms used above.
- GPS
- The US satellite navigation system used by GNSS receivers to calculate position and time. Support for GPS is important because it is widely available and often used together with other constellations for more reliable positioning.
- I2C
- I2C is a two-wire communication bus used by many sensors and small modules. It matters because several I2C devices can share the same two wires, but each device needs a compatible address and your controller must support I2C.
- LiDAR
- A sensing method that uses laser light to measure distance and build a 3D picture of the surroundings. It matters for robotics and autonomous systems because LiDAR data can help with mapping, navigation and obstacle detection.
- microcontroller
- A microcontroller is a small computer on a chip that runs your program and controls connected inputs and outputs. For this product, it is the part that reads buttons and sensors, drives the display and speaker, and communicates over Bluetooth.
- PWM
- Pulse Width Modulation is a way for a digital pin to simulate variable output power by switching on and off very quickly. It matters for controlling things like LED brightness, motor speed, or servo-style signals from a microcontroller pin.
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Related Tutorials
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