The maker of this LiDAR sensor thinks that its 3D-printed shell evokes a “jumbo-sized juice container or Ghostbusters gizmo”. It’s running on a Raspberry Pi 5 and happily capturing the world as a point cloud.

Family inspiration

The build is named after the maker’s late grandfather, Peppe, who was a real eccentric and tinkerer. The family jokes that the maker is possessed by Peppe’s ghost, because when they go down tinkering rabbit holes, they can’t stop. They’re an industrial designer by day and have always been a bit obsessed with machines and how they “see” — hence the idea to build their own LiDAR scanner from scratch. Raspberry Pi turned out to be the perfect brain for the job, being small, capable, and — best of all — completely hackable.

How it works

Inside the 3D-printed Ghostbusters-esque shell, a Raspberry Pi 5 juggles a lot. Two Raspberry Pi camera modules plug in to the CSI ports for synchronised RGB colour capture. The built-in real-time clock on Raspberry Pi 5 came in super handy for this build, since LiDAR, cameras, and IMU need to run perfectly in sync. The LiDAR sensor sends its data via the Ethernet port. A few chunky buttons and a status LED connect to the GPIO pins, so you can see when scans have started and stopped without the need for a screen. An SSD is mounted on top to handle the huge amount of incoming point cloud data. The scans get heavy fast, and Raspberry Pi 5 handles every byte without breaking a sweat.

The maker has taken the scanner out into the world to capture point clouds of landmarks, and posted the results to Instagram as short videos. The response has been wonderful, with designers, architects, and robotics enthusiasts piling into the comments asking how they built it; many were surprised a Raspberry Pi could pull this off (we weren’t!). Invitations have come in to take the device around the world to help with all kinds of missions, including cave mapping, ancient tree appreciation, archaeology, and even some vigilante pothole scanning.

There are many more incredible images on the project’s official Instagram, but for now we’ll leave you with this detailed walkthrough of the machine in action. It’s voiced by its talented, if enigmatic, maker.