This is really cool
One thing I'd suggest, for any hardware product, is that when doing your bill of materials to provide links and show estimated costs. Sure, these will change but having a rough idea of the costs is really helpful, especially when perusing on from things like HN. It can be a big difference for someone to decide if they want to try it on their own or not. It is the ballpark figures that matter, not the specifics.
You did all that research, write it down. If for no one but yourself! Providing links is highly helpful because names can be funky and helps people (including your future self) know if this is the same thing or not. It's always noisy, but these things reduce noise. Importantly, they take no time while you're doing the project (you literally bought the parts, so you have the link and the price). It saves yourself a lot of hassle, not just for others. Document because no one remembers anything after a few days or weeks. It takes 10 seconds to write it down and 30 minutes to do the thing all over again, so be lazy and document. I think this is one of the biggest lessons I learned when I started as an engineer. You save yourself so much time. You just got to fight that dumb part in your head that is trying to convince you that it doesn't save time. (Same with documenting code[0])
Here. I did a quick "15 minute" look. May not be accurate
Lidar:
One of:
LD06: $80 https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803352905216.html
LD19: $70 https://www.amazon.com/DTOF-D300-Distance-Obstacle-Education/dp/B0B1V8D36H
STL27L: $160 https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2726.html
Camera and Lens: $60 https://www.amazon.com/Arducam-Raspberry-Camera-Distortion-Compatible/dp/B0B1MN721K
Raspberry Pi 4: $50
NEMA17 42-23 stepper: $10 https://www.amazon.com/SIMAX3D-Nema17-Stepper-Motor/dp/B0CQLFNSMJ
[0] When I wrote the code only me and god understood what was going on. But as time marched on, now only god knows.
Learning projects like this is about to get a lot less accessible due to the extreme tariffs and elimination of the de minimis exemption. Take that BOM and multiply it by 2X or 3X depending on the source and how many different shipments arrived.
I can’t tell you how depressing it is to go from having access to cheap learning materials for introducing kids (and adults) to electronics, and now it’s being taxed away in the name of improving the US competitiveness or something. Total footgun.
I’ve been jokingly calling my electronics hobby of the past few years “getting my EE degree.”
Putting together PCBs, reading and replicating schematics, designing my own hardware. It’s been really fun and has paid dividends for my career (firmware). If the US is interested in bringing knowledge of manufacturing back this is a very very bad way to do it. How many undergrad projects are now impossible because the BOM has quadrupled? How many future mechanical/electrical engineers are not going to get into hardware because of this?
It’s all going to be gone. I’ve spent roughly $1200 last year having PCBs and ordering sensors etc. that goes to $4000 with these executive orders.
It’s insanity, pure insanity.
There is a small part of that wonders if it is by design given how much it exposes a person to the inner workings of the things they use daily, but then I bring myself back to reality. I sincerely doubt now there is a real long term plan at work here. At best it is all situational and reactive ( tactical, maybe, but not strategic thinking at work ).
Both can be true. There was incentive to prevent people from building, repairing, and modifying things. It need not be malicious with the intent to prevent people from getting into the field. Instead it only need be naïve and selfish. Sony suing because people put Linux on their PS3. Remember these people will also try to sue white hat hackers who submit vulnerability reports. It's not a long term plan to destroy, instead it's an extremely short sighted and naïve plan to build a wall and protect.
You'll find that naïve shortsightedness often is indistinguishable from malicious foresight, when looked back upon. So remember how to stop it: think of the little things, the compounding effects. There's always costs and trades being made, there's no free lunch. As the world gets more advanced it gets more complex. The more complex it gets the more those little subtle things matter
There is no plan it’s instincts. Complete devoid of actual thoughts.
Yeah, it's already been like this in a lot of Europe where there is no De Minimis exemption.
E.g. in Sweden, PostNord has a government granted monopoly and charge about $20 per imported package, which adds up fast.
It really sucks, free trade and competition is what we need.
Why didn’t someone just set up domestic manufacturing for those hobbyist parts?
Sweden as an example is 10 million people. The world is 8000 million, 800x larger. The affluent parts of the world are somewhere between 100-1000 million, so the market potential is 10-100x larger. If one is able to address the global market, the economy of scale around manufacturing will be heavily in favor of that. This is particularly true for hobbyist stuff, because it tends to be both (relatively) low volume and low margin. And also price sensitive, in that people might just adjust their hobbies based on what is affordable/not.
This is just demand side. Of course producing in Sweden will be more expensive than in China - for electromechanical things, Shenzhen is likely better on every single metric...
Assuming this wasn’t sarcasm: For many hobbies the parts come from all over the world. You can’t expect hobbyists in every country to set up manufacturing for every part.
Even if they did, the raw materials have to come from other countries. The machines probably come from other countries. Setting up little factories all over the world isn’t efficient so prices would be extremely high. Parts might be cheaper importing from other countries even with extreme tariffs.
It’s all just a mess of bad policy. We lose out when governments restrict our ability to make small, simple purchases from other countries without heavy cost overhead.
Comparative advantage
Is this sarcastic? It does read like it.
I’ll take it on face value:
Cause domestic manufacturing for hobbyist parts is not economically viable
I wonder how that additional cost breaks down. Is it mostly cost of labor? Supply chain access? Environmental controls and compliance? Other overheads not present in China? Is economically viable production possible in the US?
If you're smart enough to design and build a LIDAR, you're smart enough to make $200,000 a year working for the big adtech companies.
You'd need an enormous hobbyist robotics market to be able to sustain a business making and selling $60 LIDARs with that wage bill.
For hobby parts? It’s not viable because you’d be setting up a manufacturing operation to serve a small number of people. The fixed costs would be so high you’d never get it back.
Contrast that with someone setting up an operation to serve the entire world, a market 1000 times larger than many localities.
Doesn't change the fact that the advice is still beneficial. At worst you still have a good history of the effect of these tariffs.
I'd call the tariffs the second death of hardware though. The first was when we killed all the parts stores. That was a slower death, coupled with the loss of right to repair. But we've been making big strides in that domain, so I hope we can undo that death. If we can also undo the dumb tariffs too then ironically we might have a chance to bring back hardware which somewhat seems inline with what that party (claims to/pretends to) wants.
> we killed all the parts stores
We ran out of people buying from parts stores - hobby electronics became less popular.
Eras of hobbies:
Mechanical Chemical Electronic Computer hardware Computer software [What's now?]It is not just a question of popularity. Post 9/11 skillsets around chemical ( or other scary looking domains ) became vilified within general populace and then that vilification was normalized with shows like 24 ( which is a great show... it just sucks that people are unable to separate the world it presents from their world ). It does not help with the advent of red flag laws, where neighbors can effectively call cops on you if they see something that bothers them..
I'm not aware of the chemical hobby era. And as I watched it happen, the electronic hobby era died at the same time as the mechanical. Most of the mechanical one was cars. It happened as it became harder to repair things. The barrier to entry increased, the availability of parts decreased with decreasing demand. It is a negative feedback loop.
Mechanical: I was thinking more Meccano and home built steam engines - cars came later.
Chemical: I was thinking chemistry sets and the age when Chemistry was geeky cool (Du Pont, Uncle Tungsten).
My grand father was a structural engineer, my father studied chemical engineering, I studied electronic engineering (but got a job programming). So perhaps I was thinking more of the frontier of engineering shifting rather than technical hobbies.
It would be interesting to look at geeky hobby adverts in a magazine over time and see how the advert focus shifted.
> Most of the mechanical one was cars. It happened as it became harder to repair things.
I don't think it has become harder to repair cars though. Most problems that need repair are the same old bushings, brakes, spindles, rust, bearings ...
I think it is some cultural change away from handy work in general.
Electronics have become harder to repair with smaller and more integrated circuits though.
Yeah, totally—once fixing stuff got harder and parts disappeared, the whole scene just kind of faded out.
Seems to me it's integration of whole systems.
Telling AI to write computer software.
Mechanical.
Circle of life. ;-)
Doomscrolling and influencing.
A new Radio Shack dealer just opened in a rural area, with an emphasis on radio (it's near an off-roading park), and your comment reminded me what terrible timing this is for them. Such a cruel twist.
For Americans, that is.
Come to Australia
I'm happily in the EU
Local warehousing / distribution centers? The US is not short of space.
[dead]
The good thing it’s on GitHub so you can submit a pull request for a BOM to help the person out.
Incredible that this is too expense for a company like Tesla.
What is the HN opinion on Tesla skipping lidar? Having spent some time with computer vision in university I think it's insane to skip it - sure stereo reconstruction is powerful but lighting conditions have such an impact on results that having some robust depth data feels like a no-brainer and skipping it feels like malignant neglect.
As someone who's done a lot of computer vision, it is insane to skip it. And it's sad because what everyone missed from that viral Mark Rober video [0] was not the Looney Toons wall hit but the fucking kid in the smoke. Add all the cameras and AI you want, you ain't changing the laws of physics: visible light doesn't penetrate smoke. But radar does. Every (traditional) engineer knows that safe systems have redundancy. That safe systems have redundancy through differing modalities. Use cameras, but also use radar, lidar, and even millimeter wave. Using just cameras isn't just tying one hand behind your back, it's shooting yourself in the kneecap afterwards
The argument is that humans manage the task without lidar, and automation doesn't have to be perfect it just has to be better than humans, to be a net positive. It seems to me, you might as well use lidar if it's cheap enough, but the argument that computer systems can outcompete human drivers, without using lidar, is at least reasonable, although not yet proven.
Extending this line of thought I wonder why tesla didn't make cars on two legs and insisted on using wheels?
(Just wanted to make sure - this is not a stab at you, I'm well aware that the original argument is from tesla)
We could extend the argument more. Why build a self driving vehicle at all? Build a humanoid robot to drive the car for you! The argument that computer systems can outcompete human drivers, without using lidar, is at least reasonable, although not yet proven
(I didn't just want to just make sure - this is a stab)
It's a dumb argument on multiple accounts. While it's a routine argument in software engineering it's an argument that often will get people fired and sued in testimonial.
First off, humans don't do it "just by vision". Sure, we don't have lidar but we have hearing, we have touch, we have tons of experience. We can create world models for Christ's sake and that means modeling physics. I'm sure you've seen papers that claim world models but I'm a ML researcher who also has a physics degree and I'm not afraid to tell you that's bullshit. It's as honest as Altman calling GPT PhD level intelligence. A PhD has very little to do with the ability to recall information.
Second off, it doesn't matter much how humans do it. It matters how the car can. Why limit yourself. There's tons of cars with radar and lidar. They're not more expensive and they can see an object in fog or poor light conditions. It can do something humans can't do! Why in the world would you decide not to do that. You can make an argument about price but that argument changes when that thing becomes cheaper. When that happens you're now just someone adding danger for no reason. You can't argue that only cameras will be safer. It categorically isn't. The physics is in your way.
But that is the argument made when Tesla first said they were going to use only cameras. Because everyone knew lidar would come down with scale and that's why many other manufacturers went in that direction. Which is mutually beneficial, so Tesla would benefit from joining.
Third, be careful with those claims. I'm more willing to believe 3rd party reports like from NHSTA than directly from Tesla [0]> can outcompete human drivers[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2025/02/11/tesla-ag...
Is Tesla getting into legal mess if they need to add sensors to make self driving work when they already sold that feature to car owners? Would that imply that they need to retrofit already sold cars with upgraded sensor packages?
Yes, and this is already turning out to be a problem for them. They've acknowledged that HW3 is not sufficient, and will be on the hook for those who bought the FSD package with those cars.
That isn't the end of the world, but it'd turn into a much bigger problem if they also had to add additional sensors and body modifications to support those sensors.
Solution: just never implement FSD.
My understanding is that they went the opposite direction - their cars used to have lidar, but don’t anymore.
Worse, they turned them off for the older vehicles with a software update.
They never had lidar. They had a very low resolution radar that was used for AP, and some pretty terrible ultrasonic sensors with massive blind spots.
IIRC Musk specifically said that the cars had sufficient hardware for FSD mode and advertised them as such. Tesla would have to retrofit the LIDAR sensor or pay money back to their customers if they rolled out FSD with LIDAR.
> visible light doesn't penetrate smoke. But radar does.
This is the key insight that frustrates me to no end about the whole thing. We have sensors that are better than human eyes, but we should limit ourselves to that because what? I don't use a calculator because it's slightly better at math, I use a calculator because it's fucking awesome at multiplying numbers in a way that my human brain can't remotely compete with. I want to be able to see where Elon is coming from but lately I can't.
> What is the HN opinion on Tesla skipping lidar?
Short-sighted and egotistical.
There likely have been deaths and injuries that would have been prevented by lidar, and there will likely be more in the future.
It strikes me as foolhardy that the U.S. allows self-driving vehicles to use the public roads without having to pass safety tests. I'd blame the lack of government control of public spaces as well as Tesla's engineering.
Musk is allowed to test in production with 1 ton metal machines racing at 100 km/h without it entailing legal responsibility. Amazing the influence that a few million believers on social media can buy you these days
My opinion is that skipping lidar is nonsense. Check Mark Rober's video, published one month ago, "Can You Fool A Self Driving Car?" where he compares a Tesla with other Lidar-equipped cars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ
> the HN opinion
I'm not sure why you'd think HN has a monolithic opinion, this is a site with myriad different users.
Maybe they're more asking for the whole breadth of opinions available from the HN community?
True, but you will find that some subjects align people more closely than most others.
interesting claim i read in another thread a couple weeks ago:
>Tesla Vision is, currently, legally below minimum human vision requirements and has historically been sold despite being nearly legally blind.
There will be time in the very near future (read five years time) people will not buy vehicle (car, bike, etc) without lidar as the price become insignificant as car reverse camera, and it become commonplace.
Personally now I'll not buy any vehicle without assisted camera parking and apparently many people will agree with this important feature including Marques Brownlee [1].
[1] Reviewing my First Car: Toyota Camry Hybrid! [video]:
A similar situation to Jobs reciting research on how optimal the one button mouse is. A thought bubble.
Why, we will perhaps never know. But likely they were early and it was deemed too expensive back then, or didn't find a supplier they could work with. Now there's too much prestige in it and they can never back down which would be admitting to a mistake.
It would be one thing if it was a one time event but then they repeated that playbook with the lack of a rain sensor.
I can only speak for myself, but I work on this stuff in this industry: Tesla’s choice is asinine at this point. It’s one thing to claim cameras only and find that won’t work and pivot, but they are so dug in that they can’t admit they were wrong and won’t do so. So it’s asinine now.
>It’s one thing to claim cameras only and find that won’t work and pivot, but they are so dug in that they can’t admit they were wrong and won’t do so. So it’s asinine now.
Didn't they start with lidar or radar or similar and then go back to only using vision based technologies?
What do yes call a person that has only visual sensory? Disabled.
Humans have sight, touch, taste, sound, smell, and vascular sensory. Only a portion of systems used in self drive automation.
Humans also have a vestibular system[1] and proprioception[2], which I think are very important in making judgments about safe following distance, car handling, and road conditions, in particular in adverse conditions like strong side winds and slippery or icy roads, which may not always be visually obvious.
While some of this can be handled by an IMU, I think humans still have a strong advantage in fusing their various sensory inputs, thanks to millions of years of evolution.
Well I haven't used taste nor smell in my driving yet. Touch only as far as vibration and steering wheel torque (both not difficult to sense with electronics).
That narrows it down a bit.
Never once smelled or tasted something funny when driving and realize you’d better pull over… like… right now? I have.
I think it was a valid decision that turned out to be incorrect and is staying put as a result of stubbornness. People really like criticizing decisions in hindsight especially here where the armchair engineer with the benefit of hindsight is too common.
People have been criticizing this decision from the get go. It may have upgraded from engineers to the general public but let's be honest, the latter doesn't matter in a topic like this anyways
They should have had the benefit of hindsight as well thanks to testing.
It was a valid experiment and pushed computer vision but it clearly failed a long time ago. The fact that Teslas are not only still sold without lidar but “autopilot” is pushed as safe is disgusting.
People will die (and have already died) horrifically because of this decision. It’s morally bankrupt.
I assume the same would apply to any car not using LIDAR? Or just Tesla because they decided on a different tech stack?
Radar technology offers a range of applications, including the ability to detect objects around corners, behind obstacles such as brick walls, and even penetrate human bodies at specific frequencies. However, when multiple sensors yield similar results, it becomes challenging and costly to discriminate which results are valid.
Operating radar at a specific frequency, such as 2.45 GHz (a microwave frequency often used due to its affordability), can be ineffective in environments rich in water droplets (e.g., rain), as these can dominate the radar signals. Higher frequencies enable the detection of smaller water droplets, but switching between frequencies can be expensive. Additionally, varying the radar's detection range to identify objects of different sizes complicates the calculations, involving factors such as minimum and maximum range, power, and time on target.
Cameras typically detect non-moving objects by comparing successive images. In contrast, radar can identify both stationary and moving objects and determine their direction relative to the sensor by emitting a frequency and analyzing the reflected pulses. Lidar, on the other hand, uses light to measure the distance to objects in its path, employing a photoreceptor to capture the reflected light.
That'll likely be why LIDAR is used rather than RADAR.
I was responding to Tesla skipping Lidar but apparently it’s a sore topic. As pointed out by someone else Tesla used to use ultrasonic radar sensors but stopped.
“ Until this month's change, all Model S and Model X EVs intended for North America were equipped with radar sensors but the company has been building new Model 3 and Model Y vehicles without any front radar sensors since May 2021. That's when Tesla announced a change for those models away from radar to Tesla Vision” 0
I don’t think many people understand how these systems work but we’re not on a radar or engineering forum.
0. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a39250157/tesla-no-radar-s...
This isn't too expensive for Tesla, it's just nowhere near the level needed for an AV. Automotive lidars are 10-20 scans/second, rated for dust/rain/etc, and need a range of at least 50 meters, but 100-200 is more ideal. Not a fan of Tesla's approach, but I wanted to clarify that it's not like they can just use a lidar like this and call it a day. The specs are completely different and that really drives up cost!
Maybe something like this: https://linuxgizmos.com/sony-introduces-as-dt1-described-as-...
> With a horizontal field of view of 30° or more and 576 ranging points (24 x 24), the sensor supports a frame rate of 30 fps, with a reduced 15 fps mode for maximum distance operation.
The requirements for electronics in a car are pretty extreme (temp, durability), not that I disagree, but it's not apples to oranges.
> requirements for electronics in a car are pretty extreme
+ the salaries of everyone working on that stuff, not just assembly but also writing the code to support it
Not that I disagree, either: at the volumes that a modest car company puts out, I'd assume it's easily worth the, say, 3% cost premium on the car's total price to have something that can actually see things you don't see and thus makes a safer system. It might even reduce costs by having lower requirements for the vision hardware and software, but that's not something I can know. There's a lot of unknowns here that I think mean we can't really do a good comparison indeed
That hasn’t stopped Tesla before. They have a track record of treating automotive-grade quality standards as optional when doing electronics sourcing[1].
As the article notes, Tesla conveniently “fixed” their thermals and durability issue that caused by inventing a feature called cabin overheat protection and marketing it as for people/animals overheating and not for the non-automotive-spec electronics in the cabin.
If you can’t bring auto quality electronics to the car, just change the car so it avoids standard auto thermal conditions ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...
Don’t they constantly get tested as the safest car in the world? I saw it years ago in some American news and the first google result is from New Zealand last year https://www.drivencarguide.co.nz/news/tesla-model-y-is-the-s...
They wanted to sell “self driving ready” packages 10 years ago, when LiDAR actually was expensive. So at the time, they had to make big deal about LiDAR being unnecessary.
But now it has come down in price reportedly by more than a factor of ten so at some point a logical person would revisit that decision
it's not only about logic; his ego is now involved in it which virtually guarantees it will never be revisited.
Would this not also be the case had Tesla embraced the tech and installed thousands into their cars?
The lidars used on self-driving vehicles are far more capable and far more expensive.
Not by that much current generation hardware for cars is $500-700. And some of the oem expect to bring it price down below $200 with the next generation equipment. Now that BYD put self driving in almost every car it will supercharge adoption and lidar prices might drop even a lot faster with economies of scale.
My (tenuous) understanding is that the challenge with lidar isn't necessarily the cost of the sensor(s) but the bandwidth and compute required to meaningfully process the point cloud the sensors produce, at a rate/latency acceptable for driving. So the sensors themselves can be a few hundred bucks but what other parts of the system also need to be more expensive?
That seems very unlikely to me. Automotive applications are already doing things like depth reconstruction based on multiple camera angles and ML inference in real time. Why should processing a depth point cloud be significantly more difficult than those things?
The basis for my understanding is a convo with a Google engineer who was working on self-driving stuff around 10-15 years ago -- not sure exactly when, and things have probably changed since then.
At the time they used just a single roof-mounted lidar unit. I remember him saying the one they were using produced point cloud data on the order of Tbps, and they needed custom hardware to process it. So I guess the point cloud data isn't necessarily harder to process than video, but if the sensor's angular resolution and sample rate are high enough, it's just the volume of data that makes it challenging.
Maybe at that time 10-15 years later we have graphic cards doing actual ray tracing lidar computing is way less complex. Anyway the $200 I is for the whole system not just sensors so that would include signal processing
Makes sense. Maybe doing self driving well just requires a ridiculously high bandwidth regardless of data source. Related, the human visual system consumes a surprisingly large quantity of resources from metabolic to brain real estate.
The whole point of lidar is to massively increase the amount of ranged data you have to work with.
- [deleted]
This doesn’t seem to stop Teslas competition in self-driving cars from implementing it; and succeeding far more in safety and functionality while doing so.
What is the cost of a human life worth?
edit: seriously, a $4,000 sensor and an extra, say, $3,000 for an upgraded computer module so your car can drive itself is just too much too afford?
Valuation of a statistical life is $5-10M, depending on who you ask[0].
So it’s too much to afford, or at least not singularly justifiable, unless more than 1 out of every 2000 cars kills someone in a way that would be prevented by LIDAR.
0: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109830152...
At this point having "something" would probably even beat having nothing.
I guess it's simply a big numbers thing. If you sell lots of cars, shaving a couple of hundred dollars of each car adds up.
Karpathy addressed this question at the time:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33397093
Of course he was working for Tesla back then. His opinions might be different today given that Elon is no longer signing his paycheck.
What a weird argument by Karpathy. He has a degree in physics. How does this dude not know that radar can see things not possible through camera vision. That argument there doesn't make any sense. That there's supply chains and things break and this makes it unsafe? Well that's true for every single bolt, every nut, ever little thing. I understand a drive to simplicity but you can't just throw fancy words in there like entropy while ignoring the literal physics that says camera + radar is less entropy than camera no radar. There is literally more (unique!) information available to you!
His opinions aren’t much different in interviews I’ve heard since, although of course that doesn’t mean he’s completely unbiased now.
Money better spent on marketing. Like that song about "him having a plan".
After all car sales don't drive the stock market. Public opinion does.
I’ll bet a lot of Tesla investors are wishing neither of those applied these days.
- [deleted]
Do we really need LiDAR in a Tesla? I own a Chevy Trax and it has LKAS and ADAS. Not even using LiDAR just sensor fusion with camera and radar. It’s a cheap car too. It’s car assisted driving.
I have driven a Tesla once but not with the added feature.
This isn't really something you'd ship in a car though. It's cool that we have such a rich ecosystem of devices that this can be made "off-the-shelf" - but for production use in a car? Not really practical.
This is the most ungrateful comment I've read today, harping away about how 'it should have been done'.
Well you fucking do it then.
I know that my time is so short (because I have a family) that if I can even do a project then I'm almost certainly not going to document it because getting it done will be enough of a stretch for me, and if I need to come back and re-do it again, I am probably not going to even bother. Not all of us live in mom's basement and have the luxury of extra time.
It was not ungrateful.
It was a general suggestion for everyone doing hardware projects and OP did a lookup and provided the additional info / links, which sparked further discussions.
Chill.
He did 'do it', and saved us all the 10-15minutes it took.
