My team recently got an a2m12 lidar and I have been playing with it over winter break. I was wondering if anyone has worked with these before and would be willing to give me some help/answer a few questions.
A) What library did you use(or did you use one)? I’ve been working in Python (on a Raspberry Pi), and everything I have found has been poorly documented, and most of it hasn’t worked. I considered using the C++ library Slamtec makes but the only documentation I could find for that was missing a lot(for example how to interact with the motor). I have been developing my own library, working off of Pyrplidar, but that has had issues of its own. If nothing else, I would love another library to look at and/or use.
B) If you didn’t use a library, do you have any advice? Additionally, how did you consistently get the data out of the serial port? The library I was building off just kinda always read the correct amount of bytes out of the buffer and hoped nothing would go wrong. Spoiler alert stuff would go wrong and it would last maybe a minute before getting offset and spilling complete gibberish. I was able to kinda solve the problem by checking each package to see if it was legit and restarting the scan if it wasn’t. However, it takes a solid 0.5+ of a second to restart and so my code spends a significant amount of time waiting around for the lidar to restart.
C) How/Can you change the sample rate of the lidar? my sensor is supposed to take up to 16000 measurements per second but the highest it wants to go is just under 8000. I feel like this should be solvable in software but after maybe 30 min of Googling I couldn’t find anything.
D) This one is gonna sound super weird but what colors were your sensors? Every image I have seen of the a2m12 is blue and black but mine is purple and black. I checked and both the box and the sensor are labeled as a2m12s. Its probably nothing but I figured I would ask since it is still super weird.