A talented Maker by the name of “Berryjam” recently created a slick Arduino-based laser rangefinder.
As HackADay’s Nicholas Conn reports, the project was originally inspired by a LIDAR system built around the popular board.
“[Berryjam] decided that he wanted to successfully use an affordable Open Source Laser RangeFinder (OSLRF-01) from LightWare. [He] measures the time between an outgoing laser pulse and the reflected return pulse; this time directly relates to the distance of the object,” writes Conn.
“Sounds simple? In practice, it is not as simple as it may seem. [Berryjam] has done a great job doing some real world testing of this device, with nice plots to top it all off. After fiddling with the threshold and some other aspects of the code, the resulting accuracy is quite good.”
In terms of final thoughts for the project, Berryjam notes that even though the OSLRF-01’s $150 price tag may seem a bit steep, it is still “pretty good” for such a device.
“For me it is very hard to imagine all those conversions/ detections and other magic happening at the speed of light [without the OSLRF-01],” he adds. “Imagine how much time light travels 50cm distance. About 1.67 nano seconds, nano – thats one billionth part of second. Amazing, isn’t it?”
Interested in learning more? You can check out the project’s official page here.
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