Project feasibility - Police Speed Gun

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Hi everyone,

I am currently a rising senior majoring in computer engineering. I wasn’t able to secure an internship this summer so I wanted to come up with ideas for projects.

One of my project ideas is creating a police speed gun that uses LIDAR to measure the speed at which a vehicle is moving. I was thinking of buying a LIDAR sensor to measure the vehicles speed and using a microcontroller to perform the logic of calculating the speed and displaying it onto an LCD screen. I know I could also use a doppler radar sensor to also to measure speed, but I want to know if this is possible with LIDAR sensors.

I was planning on using this LiDAR sensor:

Benewake TF03 LIDAR LED Rangefinder IP67 (180 m)

I know the range and accuracy of the gun is going to be significantly worse than an actual police speed gun due to the LIDAR sensor. Despite this, would this project be possible to implement with the given sensor to some degree? I appreciate all the responses.

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Hello @IloveGraceKelly and welcome to the forum!

I found this short article which might be useful for you: Police Speed Guns: Differences Between LIDAR and RADAR?

As I see, you can definitely use LIDAR to create police speed gun.

But I also found that range for these police LIDARs is around 1km to 3km. So it might be that range of this Benewake LIDAR with 180 meters maximum could be too short. I guess it should work, but you may not be able to stop the car that is speeding up :smiley: I guess police uses LIDARs with bigger range because of this?

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That’s a bit unfortunate since internships do give experience working with companies, the politics and project requirements. Have you reached out to any companies you may want to work at later to help them more on a volunteer basis provided they cover the costs of materials? This might help you get a foot in the door.

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