Brian Starkey provides a driver for interfacing with the OKDO LIDAR_LD06 module, which is an extremely inexpensive, and pretty capable, time-of-flight lidar sensor.
The sensor produces 4500 points/second, with a configurable sweep rate, allowing more/less angular resolution, traded off against refresh rate. The default scan rate is 10Hz, giving around 0.9 degree angular resolution, 10 times/second.
The LIDAR continuously outputs packets on its serial output, which must be processed in a timely manner – there is no way to slow down or stop the data coming from the sensor.
The LIDAR produces one packet every ~2.8ms.
This library provides entirely DMA-and-interrupt driven processing for capturing the data from the LIDAR and validating the packets with their CRC values. Valid received packets are passed to a user-provided callback, so you can do what you want with them (for example, put them into a queue and handle them from your main thread).
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