derek_frome

The WHOOP strap is the best I’ve seen and is very accurate.

We do a tremendous amount of testing to ensure real-world reliability, and our customers' results bear that out. Full functional safety certification is slated for end of this year, which means it's already well underway.

We make a point of this because legacy spinning lidar is unreliable. But it's unreliable because of the analog design, not because spinning is inherently unreliable.

This is the spec for a cold start. If you give it a warm start, you can operate it much lower than -20C! For instance, it's being used in underground mines in Scandinavia without issue.

This has a single moving part - a brushless motor that turns the turntable. It's rated for over 100,000 continuous hours of operation, and passes automotive shock and vibration standards.

There's a good explanation in the post about what we mean by digital lidar, but the tl;dr version is we use silicon CMOS chips for lasers and detectors vs analog components like side emitting lasers and APDs used by legacy lidar providers.

Solid state is a bit of a buzzword, and most "solid state" lidar sensors actually have small, delicate moving parts inside. Solid state sensors are aimed primarily at consumer vehicles, which are still many years away.

The benefit is (at least in theory) easier integration into the vehicle fascia and (again, in theory) higher reliability vs legacy spinning lidar, which are quite unreliable in the real world.

Ouster's digital lidar sensors are much more reliable than the legacy analog spinning lidar sensors, and much more compact - and therefore easier to integrate.

Email derek.frome at ouster dot io. I'd love to learn about your project!

While this is a ~80% discount on other 128 beam sensors, it's unfortunately still out of reach for the hacker community. We absolutely plan to get prices down to an affordable level for individuals in well under 5 years!

Also, Ouster runs a sponsorship program that gives deeply discounted or free sensors to cool projects. If you have a cool idea, shoot me an email: derek.frome at ouster dot io