After some searching, I ended up using a microcontroller and a piece of code borrowed from the web that I tweaked and adapted. The microcontroller-based concept was chosen because I wanted to scale ...

The IR sensor array, which on the palm-sized vehicle consisted of just a handful of components, evolved into a PCB-backed bar nearly 0.5 meters wide. Potentiometer tuning was a fiddly affair, but ...

It’s an interesting take on a 3D scanner. He used a stepper motor to rotate the object being scanned, and an Arduino for control, but the real novelty is the way he used the sensor.