I am looking to use the 360 degree RPLIDAR scanner with a BeagleBone black running Debian. Is there support for this or should it work?
The RPLIDAR outputs its signals on a 3.3V UART, so it can indeed be connected to one of the BBB’s UARTs without needing to do voltage shifting.
The data format for the RPLIDAR is described on page 5 of the manual:
Depending on what you want to do, you might need to write your own code to process the data.
We did find this ROS library that might be helpful: