OpenSimpleLidar
Did the same exact thing back in 2015 that used the omnivision sensor in wiimotes, having the benefit that the sensor readily reports the position of detected infrared spots, so no cpu-heavy postprocessing needed. The 20MHz clock for the sensor was taken from CLKOUT from the controlling avr cpu, so only three parts on the rotating part (laser, cpu, sensor).<p>I would recommend adding a slit and a bandgap filter to reduce the amount of non-laserlight, because i had big problems with false positives from stray light (sunlight etc).