I have a Optical distance sensor (http://www.ifm.com/products/nz/ds/O1D100.htm) professionally installed by an electrician and it is wired into my Arduino UNO. I get readouts as an integer range in my logs but I am wanting to know if this is the correct laser sensor to use and if I can carry on. At the moment the logs returned data seems quite random. The analog input docs on the Arduino specs say it should be a range between 0-1024.
Has anyone used one of these for their project and if yes, did they get a good result?
Perhaps the "professional electrician" did not know what he or she was doing. A professional would have left you with a working installation and would have explained to you how it works.
Ask him/her to either fix it, or explain how the rangefinder was configured and for a wiring diagram that you could post.
I looked at the spec sheet. It doesn't say much about interfacing it to other equipment. How do you know what its interface to an Arduino should be? Does it operate in sync with some signal, or does the data from it just arrive? You'll have to learn a lot more about this before you can figure out how to interface it.