Lidar and single board computer

Help & Support Robot Parts
1

Hello,

for an autonomously operating small vehicle (my hobby sector) I am looking for a lidar scanner…

… RPLidar A1M8 appears to be a good choice.

My main question is: Which small single-board computer (no laptop and no PC) is advisable to store and evaluate the rapidly incoming data in order to establish a “map” of the current surrounding ?

An Arduino is not suitable …

Thanks in advance for any hint !

Cheers,

Volker

2

Hello @Robot2022 and welcome to the RobotShop community!

A great choice would be a Raspberry Pi.

But you could also use a Jetson.

RPLIDAR SDK supports Windows, macOS, and Linux, so I guess any single board computer that supports any of theos OS could work.

And if you are interested in using the ROS package make sure your operating system supports ROS minimum requirements.

Good luck with your project!

3

Hi Geraldine,

thanks very much for this information; a really important stept forward, since up to now I was exclusively using Arduinos in my robots…

… unfortunately not applicable here.

May I raise a brief question, since I am not yet so familiar with Raspberries:

Will these record the distance information as a function of the corresponding angle in a kind of a 2-dim array to be processed by another unit via I2C or similar ?

Thanks very much again !

Cheers

Volker

4

Hello Volker,

Will these record the distance information as a function of the corresponding angle in a kind of a 2-dim array to be processed by another unit via I2C or similar ?

This question shouldn’t be about the Raspberry Pi but the Lidar capabilities. The device interfaces through a serial connection and comes with a USB-to-serial adaptor. Then you can use a library to acquire the information from the Lidar, for example, in the link I shared in my previous post they use this library.

And use the function iter_scans to accumulate measurements for a single rotation and return a list of tuples, which include the angle and the distance measured at that angle.

I hope that helps!

5

Hi Geraldine,

I went for an Arduino Mega 2560. There is a number of examples at Youtube, demonstrating, that an Arduino can easily handle this job.

My current problem is: All of them are referring to a library, called RPLidar.h

This one can be found on the net but no one says how and where to install this .h type file within the Arduino software environment.

Do you or does anyone know, how to proceed ?

Thnaks a lot in advance

Cheers

Volker

6

Hi @Robot2022!

Sorry for the late reply, the .h file is the header file which contains the function declarations, you simply need to include it in your project folder, and to use it in your sketch simply use:

#include "RPLidar.h"

Regards

7

You can also choose Raspberry Pi. This tutorial will cover how to install ROS Noetic on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS OS and LiDAR integration with Raspberry Pi 4.

There are many more resources found in the internet on how to integrate LIDAR with Raspberry Pi.