Great project Daniel! Really cool that you're venturing out of software land. Looks like you would have learned a lot about Arduino from this!

I've recently been playing around with 3D scanning, but using photogrammetry. You could record high res video or take high res photographs of a scene, and then use the program Meshroom or colmap to convert those photos (cut video in to 1fps stills) in to a 3D model. If you want to play around with dense scans that may be worth a try.

Doing it with a LIDAR is nice though because it is the correct scale, something photogrammetry inherently fails at without additional sensors.

I'm a very project oriented learner, and I'm always making things and learning stuff and then pivoting with my projects. I've been doing that for 20 years and it's great because I learn whatever the hell I want and after I get good at it I can get a job in that area. So keep up the hardware projects! This one looks great.