Most Velodyne lidar drivers are needlessly complex, or specifically written for a particular middleware (e.g. ROS). This repo contains minimal, lightweight code to build shared libraries to interface to and decode packets from the Velodyne HDL (and VLP-16) family of lidars.

• PacketDriver: builds to PacketDriver.so, a library to read (via boost::asio) Velodyne packets streamed to UDP port 2368.
• PacketDecoder: builds to PacketDecoder.so, a library to decode (convert to x, y, z, intensity, etc.) Velodyne packets.
• PacketFileSender: builds to PacketFileSender, an executable to stream packets from a pcap file to UDP port 2368 (slightly modified code from VTK)
• PacketFileReader: a header file to read packets from a pcap file (code from VTK)
• PacketFileWriter: a header file to write packets to a pcap file (code from VTK)
• PacketBundler: builds to PacketBundler.so, a library to bundle streamed Velodyne packets into enough for a frame (a full 360 degree sweep) - useful if your middleware cannot handle the rate of Velodyne packet streaming (~1.8kHz)
• PacketBundleDecoder: bulds to PacketBundleDecoder.so, a library to decode a bundle of Velodyne packets

Under the tests directory you can find example code on how to use the PacketDriver and PacketDecoder libraries, as well as the PacketFileWriter header.

sudo apt-get install libpcap-dev

sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

export PATH="PATH:/..../path/to/build
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/..../path/to/build"
export LIBRARY_PATH="$LIBRARY_PATH:/..../path/to/build"
export CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH="$CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH:/..../path/to/source"

PacketFileSender pcap_file.pcap

test_PacketDriver

test_PacketDecoder

test_PacketWriter

test_PacketBundler

test_PacketBundleDecoder