How to get the volume of a point cloud done by a LIDAR

Projects Discussion and Showcase Science and Measurement
1

Hello everyone,

I would like to ask for your help to the following:

I´m working with a LIDAR LITEV3, I´m trung to get the volume from a container, now I can get only a point cloud, in rectangular or sferical coordinates, I can get the data on the serial monitor and i can export it to a txt file and that file can export to a program like mesh lab and then i can measure its volume.

Are there a better way to get the same but directly with the arduino, I mean to convert directly with some algorithm, and get the volume for example on a display?

I realy appreciate your help, and sorry about my english, Im spanish speaker.

2

According toe Garm's website, the LIDAR LITEV3 has I2C and PWM interface.

.

3

The AVR based Arduinos have very little memory for a "point cloud".

Did you have some other technique in mind to measure volume?

4

Really not, by now I´m exporting the XYZ points to an txt archive and then, I put in Mesh lab, so I can see the point cloud and get the volume, I would like something more intantaneous.

5

For informed help, you will need to provide much more information about your project.

6

Well, definitely not using an Arduino, as pointed out above it doesn't have the memory to deal with large point clouds.

Within the Arduino ecosystem: maybe, just maybe, you can do this with the ESP8266 (if your point clouds are small enough). Probably the Teensy and ESP32 (for not too big point clouds).

You can certainly do this with a RPi or similar computer, but that's completely out of scope of Arduino.

7

Alejandramagno:
Really not, by now I´m exporting the XYZ points to an txt archive and then, I put in Mesh lab, so I can see the point cloud and get the volume, I would like something more intantaneous.

A standard Arduino doesn't have anything like the computing grunt needed for this (floating point, megabytes
of storage)...

Sounds like you need an open source point cloud library (perhaps Python has one), and import the
data direct into an app on the PC/laptop that drives the calculation on the fly?

I note the pyntcloud library has a ConvexHull operation, but its really a thin layer over scipy.spatial.ConvexHull which has a volume attribute.