LiDARs: Software Engineering a Driver

Welcome!
In this video I introduce the world's coolest sensor: LiDARs. You will learn about its working principle, application, how to write a program to communicate with one, and much more!
1:00 Introduction
1:47 LiDAR Working principle
3:29 Types of Mechanical LiDARs
4:22 Solid State LiDARs
5:22 Costs
6:06 Applications
7:21 Start developing a LiDAR driver
8:15 RPLidar SDK
10:27 Using our forked SDK
11:18 Main program
12:12 Dev container cross build
12:36 Deployment
15:26 Installing in target machine
16:56 Architecture of the driver
18:11 Interfacing
20:25 Simulating the LiDAR
24:31 Final program
26:24 Mindset
27:24 Running it!
29:45 Outro
LiDAR driver: github.com/Mar...
gRPC openGL server: github.com/Mar...
Custom Linux: github.com/Mar...

[@niko_ferrey9118]

Absolutely awesome. It would be amazing if you can explain how to use a raspberry pi in robotics and how to make a deployment from a laptop. Keep it going!!

[@practicalsoftwaremarcus]

I will!!

[@sr.otavio8248]

awesome explanation

[@rakshitx1]

What are your opinion on ROS and its current state?

[@practicalsoftwaremarcus]

I've used ros and ros2 (more than ros1) for many years, both for academic and industrial applications. I think it is a brilliant framework and ros2 especially forces you to use nice software design patterns on the way. It does achieve its goal which is to facilitate development and decoupling of different problems. Over time I've been using less because it always introduced such a big dependency to the application, among other constraints. What if I want to build software for a particular Linux distro or hardware that does not support it(not even compilable..)... Maybe I will make a video on it ;)