Hello, my name is Rachel and I am having difficulty integrating the Benewake TFMINI Micro LIDAR Module with a raspberry pi. Is it possible to connect the two together and how would one do so?
Hi Rachel,
The first issue you may face is that it expects 5 V DC interface (UART and power). Also, it has a high peak current of ~800 mA, so it is possible that if you power it directly from your RPi you may not have enough power for stable use.
The best place to start would be to address the following concerns:
- Ensure a proper 5 V DC power source is connected to your TFMINI.
- Ensure there is a common ground between the RPi and the TFMINI.
- Ensure you have appropriate voltage level translation between the RPi and the TFMINI UART interfaces (3.3 V DC <> 5.0 V DC). For example, you can use the RB-Spa-879.
- Check out the datasheet (page 7) for details getting data from the TFMINI. You can find it on the product page under Useful Links.
You can also check the Arduino example for the RB-Ben-01 since they use similar data format. You can find it here.
- Use the serial interface on your Raspberry Pi to connect to the UART interface of the TFMINI and obtain the data. It should be quite straightforward to achieve this using Python and pySerial.
We hope this helps getting you started!
Sincerely,
P.-S.: A secondary option would be to leave all real-time data gathering to a lower-level microcontroller board, such as an Arduino-compatible board that would read from the sensor directly and this would report back to the RPi through a USB virtual serial port.