At Floored Inc, I built a device for taking 3D scans of interior spaces. Using a Hokuyo laser rangefinder, a 2D color camera, and a computer mounted on a motor-controlled tripod, I was able to create some nice point clouds (as above), linked with image data. “Nelson,” as we called v0 of this scanner, was built in Node.js (albeit with many C bindings). Node’s asynchronous style was both a blessing and a curse for this project; on the one hand, it made it easy to parallelize tasks that could be performed independently of each other, but was a pain when work needed to be done sequentially. I would love to share my code, but unfortunately it belongs to Floored! You can see a picture of Nelson and me here, though!
