> Cheap LIDAR units could open up weird DIY uses and not just cars.

Interestingly, there are already some comparatively cheap LIDAR units on the market.

In the automotive market, ideally you need a 200m+ range (or whatever the stopping distance of your vehicle is) and you need to operate in bright direct sunlight (good luck making an eye-safe laser that doesn't get washed out by the sun) and you need more than one scanning plane (for when the car goes over bumps).

On the other hand, for indoor robotics where a 10m range is enough and there's much less direct sunlight? Your local robotics stockist probably already has something <$400

Neato from San Diego has developed a $30 (indoor, parallax based) LIDAR about 20 years ago, for their vacuum cleaners [1].

Later, improved units based on the same principle became ubiquitous in Chinese robot vacuums [2]. Such LIDARs, and similarly looking more conventional time-of-flight units are sold for anywhere between $20-$200, depending on the details of the design.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22A+Low-Cost+Laser+Dis... [2] https://github.com/kaiaai/awesome-2d-lidars/blob/main/README...

Sounds like the quality isn't all that great but LD06 sensors look like they're about $20 and someone who works on libraries about this suggested the STL27L which seems to be about $160 and here's an outdoor scan from it: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/pidar-scan-240901-0647-7997b...

Not sure if the ld06 is a scanner like this or if it's just a line (like you'd use for a cheaper robot vac).