Joe Grand who you might remember from Prototype This has been working on a Laser Range Finder, he has been nice enough to share his build issues and successes over at the Parallax Forums. He demonstrates how a CMUcam can be used to look at the reflected laser dot to determine range based on triangulation. The Parallax CMUcam he is using looks like it is currently out of stock at the moment though.
“I decided to go with the method of optical triangulation whereas the distance to a targeted object is calculated using triangulation with simple trigonometry between the centroid of laser light, camera, and object. The most compelling example is the Webcam Based DIY Laser Rangefinder (http://sites.google.com/site/todddan…m_laser_ranger) and my design is based, in theory, on this implementation.”
