There's also a company called Scanse that has a very affordable LIDAR unit, and a ROS driver. Not open source hardware, but at $350, a pretty good deal. They

There's also a company called Scanse that has a very affordable LIDAR unit, and a ROS driver. Not open source hardware, but at $350, a pretty good deal. They use the Garmin Lidar Lite v3, which has an I2C interface, and all measurements are actually computed in the sensor. The sensor itself is around $120. They also use a shaftless gimbal motor, with a slip ring, which allows for continuous rotation. scanse.io They were also generous enough to leave an exploded CAD model of their design on their kickstarter page, about halfway down, just in case you wanted to see whats going on inside, or perhaps make your own, as its mostly commercial off the shelf parts, with a custom PCB to control the motor. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/scanse/sweep-scanning-lidar https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/scanse/sweep-scanning-l...