laser point cloud scanner?

I was wondering if anyone has had a go at creating a laser point cloud scanner?

I do a fair few architectural surveys at work, and have seen the outputs from the 3d scanners (building facade and interior scans)

got me thinking.... it can't be that hard (famous last words to every pipedream) to build a tripod with an rpi running linuxcnc with an ABC axis logging a laser dot / probe distance..... then use a second tripod as a reference point for secondary scans.

maybe use an Arduino with gyro, Accel and magnetometer to level the scanner plane.... simple code plus existing libraries.

just stumbled across this, no research donehttps://www.dfrobot.com/product-2108.html

I've presently got two Bosch glm50 laser distance measurement tools (one Bluetooth and one not).... they do the job.... 

but I did wonder if there was a way to do scans with 3x rotary axis and log to sd card on rpi.

will do, been doing a bit of research and lidar seems to be the more common approach... but it seems to suffer from accuracy and spot size over distance.

but lidar seems to have the ability to scan at much higher rates (khz) against 1-20hz for the one I posted.

seems like there are lidar + rpi built options, but I'm looking for accuracy more than tonnes of rough data

I take it no one has tried this with linuxcnc before?

yes I realised that all I need to do is use 2 axis with 2 X simple platforms,

I was looking at using timing belt reduction on each drive for improved resolution and I've been about ready to push the button on 5x sensors so that I can record 5x positions at once making the axis of rotion required smaller (not that it's required) but much faster to scan.

all mounted on a camera tripod (I've got a couple spare)

a couple of NEMA 17 5mm shaft steppers (I have a few spare with small 3d printer drives )

and some aluminium brackets for the platforms and a 3d printed enclosure for the rpi4.