RPLidar In

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Welcome! RPLidar In (v1.0) brings live Slamtec RPLIDAR point-cloud data straight into Houdini as SOP geometry. Plug in the sensor, drop the node, and every rotation of the spinning laser becomes a fresh ring of points you can feed into simulations, visualizations, or interactive installations — in real time.

It's built for TouchDesigner-style interactive work: a person walks past the sensor, and their outline drives a POP or Vellum solver live, with no baking step in between.

What it does for you

• Live streaming — reads the sensor over USB and outputs one point per laser return, updated every cook.
• Recording & playback — capture the stream to disk and replay it against the timeline, so you can develop offline without the hardware connected.
• Built-in visualization — optional on-screen guides (sensor marker, range ring, beam fan, baked static map) so you can see what the sensor sees.
• Crop — cull everything outside a rotatable ground rectangle (with an interactive viewport handle), so only the points you care about reach your solver.
• Blob tracking — cluster the scan into blobs and follow them frame to frame, each with a stable id and a velocity, so a solver can react to the hand instead of a cloud of anonymous points. Bake the empty room and it tracks only what intrudes on it.
• Attribute color — tint the scan by angle or distance through a color ramp, for a readable view or to carry color into a render.
• Top-down camera — one click for an overhead orthographic camera, and another to frame it to your crop region.
• One-click live simulation — a button builds a ready-to-run POP network wired to the live points, plus a control null to start, stop, and reset it.
• Recipes — load a whole downstream network (sim + look) from a single .py file. The loader is built in; recipe packs are planned separately, so for now it loads your own.
• Self-contained — a single asset file with no Python packages to install. Talks the RPLIDAR serial protocol directly.

Who it's for

RPLidar In is for artists and technical directors building live, interactive, sensor-driven work in Houdini — installations, performances, and experiments where real movement in a room drives a simulation on screen. If you own an RPLIDAR and want its scan inside Houdini without writing serial code, this is for you.

Requirements

• Houdini 21.0 or 22.0 (Indie or Apprentice — the asset ships as .hdalc).
• A Slamtec RPLIDAR sensor. Developed and verified against the A2M12; other A2-family models should work.
• The sensor's USB/UART adapter (CP210x) — enumerates as a serial COM port.
• Windows — the tested platform.

How to use this documentation

If you're brand new, read these two pages in order:

1. Getting Started — install the asset, connect the hardware, and see your first scan.
2. Using RPLidar In — modes, outputs, visualization, crop, recording, and live simulation.

After that, the Parameter Reference covers every control, and Troubleshooting collects the fixes for common problems.

Quick tour

The node has three modes — Off, Live, and Playback — and two outputs:

• Output 0 — Points & Guides (the default display): scan points plus any visualization guides.
• Output 1 — Points (solver-ready): scan points only, with all guides stripped. With blob tracking on, this output can carry the tracked blobs instead of the full cloud.