I love the name of this device: Time-of-Flight sensor.
It measures distance by bouncing a laser beam off a surface. Today I started figuring out how to use it to measure water depth in a tank for our indoor garden. As always, software is the challenge.
I’ve previously used ultrasound for this application, but stray reflections off the side of the tank have been a problem. A prototype will tell me if the narrow beam of a Time-of-Flight sensor does a better job.