Garmin LIDAR-Lite Optical Distance Sensor - V3

You've heard about the sensors in the news, when used in self-driving cars, and now you can have your own! Garmin's LIDAR-Lite V3 is the ideal high-performance (but compact) optical distant measurement sensor solution for drone, rovers, robots, or interactive project. Garmin makes high quality sensors, they're renowned for their GPS sensors, and these LIDARs are nice and high quality devices.

You can measure up to 40 meters away with laser-based sensor that draws only 130 mA during an acquisition. You can easily adjust between accuracy, operating range and measurement time using the I2C command set.

Compact, lightweight with low power consumption

Communication via I2C (recommended and PWM

True laser distance measurements - many sensors advertised as LIDAR are not really LIDARs

Example library code available for Arduino (C/C++) and CircuitPython/Python

Note this LIDAR doesn't rotate around, it's just for measuring 'straight ahead', but it's really light and compact in comparison so when you don't need something that spins around this is a superior LIDAR.

You will need a microcontroller or microcomputer to connect to the I2C pins to read the distance values. In theory Garmin says you can take measurements at up to 500 Hz but that depends on how accurate you want the measurements. We got ~150Hz for most of our use cases.