DIGITIZE YOUR room WITH LIDAR
What’s the best way to image a room? A picture? Hah — don’t be so old-fashioned! You want a LIDAR rig to scan the space and reconstruct it as a 3D point map in your computer.
Hot on the heels of [Saulius Lukse]’s scanning thermometer, he’s replaced the thermal cam on their pan/tilt setup with a time-of-flight (TOF) cam — a Garmin LIDAR — capable of 500 samples per second and end up scanning their room in a mere fifteen minutes. position data is combined with the ranging information to produce a point cloud using Python. open that file in a 3D manipulation program and you’ll be treated to a sight like this:
That’s an image generated of a 4.7 million point cloud. It’s not perfect, but it’ll certainly do.
[Lukse] laments that the cam requires optimal lighting conditions that make it unsuitable to for a lot of outdoor imaging and is similarly limited to shorter ranges. It also necessitates hauling a laptop around so he’s considering making it an all-in-one package down the road.
Want to a lot more about how LIDAR works? check out this teardown video of a police speed enforcement LIDAR ‘gun.’ Or have a look at this (faster) completely diy laser scanner.