olivaw-lidar

A driver for SLAMTEC RPLIDAR laser range scanners written entirely in Rust. The primary target is the RPLIDAR C1, with the structure to extend to the A and S series.

let mut lidar = Lidar::open("/dev/cu.usbserial-XXXX")?; // /dev/ttyUSB0 on Linux
println!("{:?}", lidar.info()?);
lidar.start_scan()?;
for scan in lidar.scans() {
    println!("{} points", scan?.len());
}

Why pure Rust

• Cross-compiles cleanly to aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu (Raspberry Pi) and aarch64-apple-darwin with zero extra setup — no C++ toolchain, ever.
• No unsafe anywhere: the crate sets unsafe_code = "forbid".
• The protocol parsing core is no_std-compatible. Disable the default std feature and you get just the parsers, small enough for an ESP32.

The structural decision

Protocol parsing is strictly separated from I/O. That is the single most important choice in the crate: the parsers are pure functions over bytes, which makes them testable without hardware, reusable on a microcontroller, and portable to any transport. The serial-port half is a thin shell around them.