A Lighthouse in Reverse: Building a Lidar Pi with an Agent
A lighthouse turns its beam so that ships can find it. The lidar on my workbench turns its beam so that it can find everything else. Ten times a second, the LD19 sweeps an infrared laser around the room and times each reflection, a method its manual calls direct time-of-flight (LD19 Manual, 2022). Paired with a Raspberry Pi 5 and a PiSugar battery board, it becomes a portable device that knows the shape of any room I set it in. My partner on the build was my AI assistant, the agent that runs on my Mac in a runtime called Hermes. I brought the parts, four wires, and a goal. The agent brought a terminal on the Pi and a habit of checking its own work. Together we went from a bare board to a working web application in a day. What came after, a month of building, taught me how a person and an agent can experiment well together. ...