Benewake TFmini / TFmini Plus lidar¶

The Benewake TFmini lidar and TFmini Plus have an indoor range of 12m, an outdoor range of 7m and weigh only (5g).

More details on both these lidar can be found in the benewake.com’s downloads area

Note

Support for this sensor is available in Copter-3.6 (and higher) and Rover-3.4 (and higher)

Where to Buy¶

For a serial connection you can use any spare Serial/UART port. The diagram below shows how to connect to SERIAL4.

If the SERIAL4/5 port on a Pixhawk is being used then the following parameters should be set:

SERIAL4_PROTOCOL = 9 (Lidar)
SERIAL4_BAUD = 115 (115200 baud)
RNGFND_TYPE = 20 (Benewake TFmini)
RNGFND_MIN_CM = 30
RNGFND_MAX_CM = 1000 for indoor use OR 600 for outdoors. This is the distance in centimeters that the rangefinder can reliably read.
RNGFND_GNDCLEAR = 10 or more accurately the distance in centimetres from the range finder to the ground when the vehicle is landed. This value depends on how you have mounted the rangefinder.

If instead the Telem2 port was used then the serial parameters listed above should instead be:

Distances read by the sensor can be seen in the Mission Planner’s Flight Data screen’s Status tab. Look closely for “sonarrange”.