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Comment by kylehotchkiss | Hacker News Reader

Velodyne hopes to win the new phase of this game by being first to market. “The first mover sets the standard,” Neese said. “Software is 60 percent of the effort, so if you show up [later] with a new piece of hardware, it may not fit in.”

Garmin has one on the market for $150 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14032?gclid=CIzZ86-fs9MCFQ...

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That thing is basically just a laser range finder, it doesn't produce a 2D "image" of distances (unless you pair it with something to spin it around, at which point you just have a bad version of existing lidars).

> [The new Velodyne unit] provides up to a 120-degree horizontal and 35-degree vertical field-of-view

That LIDAR-Lite is only a single "pixel". The Velodyne press release doesn't specify the resolution, but I'm certain it's > 1x1.

Garmin's (or Lidarlite acquired) is a single point reader which is very restrictive for many applications.

Sometime back Quanergy made the same splash that Velodyne is making now. When you talk to them, their price points are very high, compared to what they were talking about in their press release.

I am still waiting for a decent Lidar unit that is dependable, and costs < $500 (with > 1k points per second spread across the sphere).

the garmin unit seems to only measure a single distance in the direction in which you point it. This new velodyne unit touts a 120° angle (but nothing on the horizontal or vertical resolution)

Their spinning lidars have 16 to 64 vertical beams and a horizontal resolution depending on the rotation speed with a sampling rate of 300.000 to 2.2M points/sec

http://velodynelidar.com/products.html

edit - totally missed how many people already pointed this out, sorry.

That looks to be a rangefinder, mapping the distance to a single point in front of the optics.

The device in the article maps a much larger field of view.

Great, now all you need to do is very accurately scan that over thousands of individual points per second.

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