Designing Purpose-Built Drones for Ardupilot Pixhawk 2.1

Setting up the LIDAR range finder

Again, this is a piece of hardware that some builders will tell you that you don't need. However, if you plan to autoland your plane you do. GPS and barometric pressure are accurate enough for flight. But they can be off by as much as a meter or more. When your plane is close to the ground, you want Pixhawk to know it. So you need the most accurate altimeter you can get: a rangefinder pointed at the ground:

During the setup process (installing the firmware), of course you already selected the TeraRanger rangefinder that we installed. So Pixhawk already knows that the rangefinder is attached. But how does ...