It's a great project. I built a lidar scanner for my PhD (still have the bits and a £2.5k galvo in a box somewhere). Didn't make the actual lidar unit though.

It's a great project. I built a lidar scanner for my PhD (still have the bits and a £2.5k galvo in a box somewhere). Didn't make the actual lidar unit though. This has basically become possible due to cheap and accessible TDCs. Both TI and Ams make them now, designed for gas ultrasound flow sensing. Most of the other components have been readily available for a while (not sure about the APDs, but certainly you could buy stuff from Hamamatsu or Thorlabs/Edmund). ROS makes SLAM quite easy if you have a hardware driver, though the utility that the author made for debugging is very neat.