Garmin Lidar-lite V3 sensor

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nautoloid
 
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Joined: Sat Jun 20, 2020 3:19 pm

Garmin Lidar-lite V3 sensor

Post by nautoloid »

Hi, I am a mild hobbyist that believes Adafruit is fantastic. However, I am not a good design engineer. I want to develop wearable technology for people working in roadways or in traffic areas such that as a car is approaching them, a single begins and gets stronger the closer/faster the car is. The project on the ada fruit website is almost there even with the code, it just needs some velocity vector enhancements. I'd like the wearable version to be a single sensor which will have some limitations on understanding a vehicle's exact directional vector but would be able to estimate the change in velocity in the direction of the person wearing it and alert them. Additionally, I am looking for a more sophisticated network where two sensors are used to know the entire velocity vector of a vehicle and provide a warning based on that vector relative to the traffic barrier the sensors sit upon. I work for a large corporation and woudl like to hire a professional. Do you have any recommendations to support thsi development? I could probably develop the code and do the project but, it would likely fall apart after an hour of wearing it. I've looked for developed products but all proximity sensors are geared toward vehicles it seems. Thank you

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: Garmin Lidar-lite V3 sensor

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

The main piece of feedback I can give you is, "keep working on it."

The project you described is complex enough that you'll need to do a lot of testing. At this stage, you don't have enough experimental data to know all the problems you'll need to solve, so trying to do a top-down "design it then build a version that works" process is pretty much guaranteed to fail. Instead, you need to use iterative development.

The point of iterative development is to learn the problems you need to solve as you go. Instead of trying to build a final product, you need to build a series of prototypes that help you learn. The idea you'll return to most often is, "I don't know, so let's build something and see what we can learn."

Testing your prototypes will be where you learn things you didn't know before, and discover things you didn't expect. The list of "okay, I didn't expect that" items will guide your development path. For each one, the obvious question is, "so what do we do about this?", and the response you need to cultivate is, "I don't know, let's build something and see what we can learn."

At every step, build the cheapest, simplest thing you can to collect answers for the next question. The goal is to collect information, turn that into better knowledge, and try the next thing as quickly as possible. Don't worry about being too primitive.. the prototypes you need to build to answer the next question will get more sophisticated as you learn more about the problem domain.

Good record keeping is essential. Cultivate a habit of keeping notes about everything you try, including:

- The question you're trying to answer going in
- The solution you want to try
- A prediction of the results before you make the test
- A description of what really happened during the test
- Serious thought about the relationship between your prediction and your results
- Ideas and questions that lead to the next test

You'll also want to develop a filing system built around being able to find specific information in your notes when you want to refer back to it. I personally prefer to identify all my notes with timestamps.. 2023-0210-2238 for instance.. then I use 3x5 cards to build a set of card catalogs that refer to my notes using the timestamps.

One catalog would simply be the list of experiments in order, with timestamps for all the notes associated with 'test #1' on a single card. Another would be a subject/keyword index, with cards that list timestamps of all notes that discuss 'LIDAR', for instance. Don't bother trying to create categories ahead of time though.. you won't be able to predict the ones you'll need, and trying to force ideas into a bad taxonomy is an exhausting waste of time.

If you find yourself wanting to organize the information a new way, try it out by creating another, new card catalog. If it turns out to be useful, you'll keep improving and refining it. If not, you haven't created a mess in any of your other, existing catalogs.

I also use timestamps to identify things like photos, schematics, code listings, physical circuits, and anything else I'll want to find later. The guiding principle of building and maintaining a collection of notes is, "I don't have to memorize it, I just have to know how to find it". On the other hand, any time you can't find something, that's a screaming notification that something wasn't cataloged well enough, and that you need to fix the problem as soon as you find the thing you wanted.

Learning to build and use a collection of notes is a skill like any other, but it pays off handsomely when you try to develop a complex project. There will always be more information than you can remember off the top of your head, so being able to offload and recover knowledge becomes critical to working effectively.

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