MakerFocus TFmini-s Micro Lidar Module 0.1-12M Lidar Range Finder Sensor Obstacle Avoidance Sensor Tiny Module Single Point UART I2C IO Compatible with Pixhawk Ar duino and Raspberry Pi

I used this as a help to park my car in the garage. This accurately and quickly responds to the distance of the car.

It works great, though it appears to be a little cheap. I use it to build a laser scanner based on arduino. I'm prretty happy with it since it's sooo inexpensive. It is only 40 dollars, while Lidar Lite v3 is 150+ and other lidar is 400+ or even 1000+. Of course it's not as precise as those expensive lidar, but it is really cost efficient.

This will be my 2nd TFMiniPlus. I did not remove the protective film on the first one. The first one got hot and would not function.2nd TFMiniPlus arrived, first time removed the protective film. The TFMiniPlus uses 5V but puts out 3.3V TTL for a direct connection to a ESP32.Single Trigger is easy to do.

I was able to get this up and running in no time. It appears to be very accurate and a better sensor than the acoustic distance sensor I tried. I wrote come C code to read the data and all is good.

I tried 2 of these hooked up to an Arduino Nano and also a laptop running their code. Range outdoors is about 3 feet. The best I ever did was 7 feetand this was in the shade. Please note it will not read distances less than 1 foot and when it errors it can put out some big numbers. bottom line is it works indoors ok. Outdoors forget it...I ended up buying a Lidar Lite v3 and although expensive it outperforms the TFmini by 1000%....If you want to waste $40 get this thing. If you want something that works you have to spend $130.

HCSR04 are great for little toys and close up distances. They're cheap so when one breaks, you just replace it. With LTMini not so much. The price-point is such, that if this doesn't work you will want your money back. HOWEVER, you get a device that is much faster and very precise.It's very VERY easy to use - the libraries come standard with Arduino but it's just a serial interface, easily done on every platform - the available library is using SoftwareSerial so if you're using newer devices like the Nano33 you'll have to do a bit of coding yourself. That said, you get very precise data as long as you're further away than 30cm - for my purposes that's perfectly fine. The device made my code simpler too as I can query the unit much more frequent than the cheap HCSR04.Using 5v seems to make the unit hot after some use. I'll run more tests but if passive cooling cannot keep it "functional" I will have a situation where it goes back. I sure hope that won't be needed as I like how effective the device is.

The wiring diagram is wrong. The transmit and receive colors are reversed. I was unable to make it work and when I reversed the wires it started working correctly. I purchased a second one and that one is the same.

I think it's the best performing sensor to detect approaching targets. I've used it with an Arduino to gauge distance of people approaching to turn on an LED, and compared to the HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor or a PIR motion sensor, I think it works better. The arduino code referenced in the item description on github works great, because it not only gives a readout of the distance of an object, it gives the strength, which lets you determine whether it's just a small animal passing by or a more substantial object (like a human)