I'm considering a project involving making a crude 3d scanner to take point clouds of objects. To this end I'd been looking up about time-of-flight sensors, but they all seem to have rather wide filed of view cones.
The VL53L0X is a commonly used one, but it has a field of view of 25 degrees, whereas I'm after something much narrower.
My specification for what I'd need would be:
Range: 10cm to 40cm, 5cm to 40cm would be even better, but not essential
Range precision: +/-5mm
Size of "spot": <1cm diameter at maximum (40cm) range, ideally <5mm at maximum range, anything thinner than 1cm right down to a pinpoint laser line is fine
Can be IR or visible wavelength, or even a non-optical method like ultrasound if they can be collimated enough, but if it is laser based it needs to be low enough power to be eye safe.
Interfacing must be via I2C, SPI, or something else easy to use with most 3V3 or 5V microcontrollers, via bit banging if necessary, but not CAN requiring differential 12V signalling and not the likes of something Ethernet based.
I'd be expecting the price to be broadly similar to a VL53L0X carrier board, within a factor of 2 or 3 atleast. So I'm not thinking about true LIDAR ranges and accuracy.
And I'd hope the chip, unles it comes in a fairly easy to solder SMD package (SOIC, TSSOP, something with outward legs not underside pads/balls), would be available on carrier board modules.
Any suggestions for options? I'd tried filtering lists on various seller websites, but there wasn't an option to filter or order by field of view angle.
Thanks