Also, side note, this whole straight line triangulation thing has been a thing for a long time, back when the internet made noise, the cities were geo, and the angels on fire. The only thing special about this project is the consolidation (then again thats true of pretty much all of the 3d printer and adjacent scene. The only thing we didnt have back then was cheap and accessible steppers and controllers....and the patent that kept such devices from being marketed....), but like taking images of the distortion of a straight line laser and applying some trig to find the surface height from the axis that distorted it....yeah thats old news.... Dont get me wrong, it is a neat trick, and it works. Plus low cost pixel dense cameras, cheaper line lasers (back in the day we would use wine glass stems to make a line laser from a $40 red laser pointer...that is not a typo), the positioning system (ie, steppers. controllers, feedback (hacking a mouse to keep track of turntable position...good times...), or even simply the repeatable precision of modern sub-$20 steppers), and MCU/SBC/dev-board in the market these days is insane compared to what the average joe had access to in the long ago. If your dad wasnt a systems engineer or something, most likely in aerospace, youd be lucky to even have a computer much less a chip programmer to hook up to your 25 pin parallel port.....I dont remember what my original point was, got lost in a rant down nostalgia lane.....Point is, i guess, look around, absorb, connect the dots, understand what and why, try to avoid just following tutorials and plugging wires into premade breakout boards, and youll develop a true bodger hacker way of seeing the world and be just fine in the maker space. You can do it, I believe in you!

do you still have this working HAT? I would be interested. I know it's a long time since you wrote this post...