PocketLab Voyager Study of LIDAR Basics

LIDAR—an acronym for Light Detection and Ranging—is a method for remote sensing to measure distances.  While LIDAR commonly uses reflected laser light to accomplish this, students can investigate LIDAR principles by using Voyager’s Gyroscope and IR Range Finder in conjunction with the PocketLab-Scratch integration.  PocketLab support has described a project in which Voyager was mounted to an RC BB-8 Star Wars toy to map a two dimensional image of a “room”.  In this lesson, the author has swapped the Star Wars toy with a slowly rotating turntable and has made significant changes/additions to the sbx ScratchX file provided by the PocketLab team.  The complete action video is included with this lesson.