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Hi to everyone at DIY Drones!

I don't know much about UAVs, my specialization is the design of laser products. I recently made a laser range finder by accident that might be useful in UAVs.

It started out as a project to design a new kind of chip that can measure events happening at the speed of light. Then, in order to prove that the chip worked properly, I had to make a test bed which turned into a laser range finder.

The chip has programmable performance settings so it can be used for either long range, high resolution or fast update rate measurements or some combination of these factors although not all at the same time. There is no minimum range, it works down to zero meters.

The best programmable settings give:

Best range >100m (to trees and grass)

Best resolution 1cm

Best update rate 100 readings per second 

You can see from the attachment that the range finder is quite small. The optics are made from acrylic so the whole thing is very light weight. It has an SPI connection to a host processor or it can have one already attached like in the picture. The laser is Class 1M. The optics are separate from the electronics so that they can be scanned with a servo or mounted on gimbals. It runs from 4.5V to 7.2V batteries and draws less than 200mA.

At the moment I'm looking to see if there is a market for something like this. I might consider producing small quantities for around $450. I'm not based in the USA so there are no export restrictions.

Finished unit.jpg