Most police departments made a big switch from RADAR to LiDAR after consumers starting buying RADAR detectors. A lot of those LiDAR units are now out there on the surplus market. If you don’t have $500 or so to buy a LiDAR gun just to see what makes it tick, you are in luck. [Alexei Polkhanov] spent an hour tearing down a UltraLyte LTI 20-20 LR 100 so you don’t have to.
An hour seems like a lot for a tear down video, but [Alexei] speeds up through the boring parts, and spends a lot of time talking about the optics and how the device works (with a lot of hand drawn diagrams). He also puts it back together and connects a scope to show the electronic operation of the device.
He mentions the display and control board uses a serial interface to talk to the controller board. There is also an unpopulated header on the main board that is clearly a serial port, probably for reprogramming the onboard microcontroller. With a little reverse engineering work, this LiDAR gun ought to be highly hackable.
In addition to the display and control board, the unit contains a high voltage supply for the laser and the photodiode. Making a power supply to drive the laser that is clean enough not to disturb the sensor is one of the design drivers and it shows. The power supply is a large and complex board by comparison to the other boards in the system.
We’ve covered LiDAR for robotics before, but the UltraLyte unit is pretty serious industrial-strength unit by comparison. If you want to learn more about how a professional LiDAR unit works, or you just want to know what technology to be mad at next time you are stopped for speeding, watch [Alexi’s] video.
Filed under: teardown
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