Open source · RPLIDAR C1 · macOS

Live RPLIDAR C1 scans on your Mac.

Sub-200 ms startup, 460 800 baud, zero dropped frames. PySide6 + pyqtgraph.

Unsigned build — first launch needs a Gatekeeper bypass. Release notes.

What you get.

Live polar plot

~10 Hz scans rendered in real time with scan-rate and point-count readout.
Port auto-discovery

Filters pyserial enumeration to USB-CDC / CP210x. One click.
Snapshot PNG

Retina-aware, device-pixel resolution.
CSV recording

Per-scan append, blinking REC indicator while active.
Range & quality filter

5 cm – 12 m, quality > 0.
Background QThread

UI never blocks on serial I/O.

Four engineering decisions that make the C1 behave on macOS.

lidar/worker.py
We bypass pyrplidar.scan_generator().

The generator aborts on the first short serial read, and the C1 has ~200 ms of startup lag after SCAN. We read raw 5-byte frames straight off pyserial.
lidar/worker.py
dsrdtr=False re-open on connect.

pyrplidar opens the serial with hardware flow control on, which blocks the C1's TX stream. We re-open the underlying pyserial.Serial without it.
lidar/worker.py
4 s watchdog, no silent reconnect.

First-data delays and transient stalls both raise. Reconnects require an explicit user gesture so hardware issues stay visible.
ui/main_window.py
DirectConnection + lock for the recorder.

Record toggles must dispatch mid-scan — a QueuedConnection cannot. Cross-thread safety comes from worker._recorder_lock.

git clone https://github.com/rishimule/polarscope.git
cd polarscope
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

python main.py