L515 for Mobility Mapping

Hi everyone,
I’m currently working on a small indoor mobile robot project that needs reliable high-resolution depth sensing at close range. I chose the Intel RealSense LiDAR Camera L515 because it offers depth capture from ~0.25 m up to about 9 m, with up to 30 fps at 1024×768 resolution.

The L515 is mounted on the front of a small wheeled robot platform, at ~30 cm above the floor, tilted downward ~15°. I’ve connected it via USB-C (USB3 Gen1) to a Raspberry Pi 4, running the RealSense SDK 2.0.  The robot uses the depth point cloud to build a 2D occupancy map + simple 3D mesh of the room in real-time (~20 fps practical). Power draw at steady streaming is ~3 W (well below the typical <3.5 W spec). 

What I’m still working on:

 After ~20 minutes of continuous streaming the module seems to warm up noticeably, and sometimes frames drop or return black. I’m planning to add a small heatsink and ensure airflow around the camera’s vents.

I noticed that on one test system the camera wasn’t detected under newer SDK versions (2.49+). On that board earlier SDK (2.48) worked fine. I’m careful now to stick with SDK 2.47 for this build

Has anyone here done something similar with the L515 for mobile robotics or indoor mapping? I’d love to hear how you managed thermal regulation or frame-drop issues for long runs. Whether you used the latest firmware or had to revert to older SDK versions for stability.

Thanks in advance!