We have an old high speed road texture measurement machine that has been made in 1998 by WDM. But the software and the computer is pretty much unusable. This machine basically use 3, 20mW lasers to measure the road surface undulations and plot against the distance it travels on the road.
I'm thinking to restore the machine using an arduino to read the laser distance measurment sensors and store the data. I'm bit new to ardionu, so what should I need to look in to if I'm going to do this? any warnings (It's laser, of course I need to be careful). Any guides on interfacing the arduino and laser sensors?
Oh my. Do you have any documentation on the machine? Datasheets? Whatever you do, don't forget protection goggles.
Without extensive documentation (protocols, command interface, voltage levels) you won't get anywhere. When you have that, do post it, so we can comment on whether and if so how an Arduino could talk to that machine.
Even if you get the Arduino to talk to the machine and get it's data, it'll almost certainly have to relay that data to a much more powerful system (laptop, PC, RPi) to do any analyses on the gathered data.
At least you should give a call to the original manufacturer, maybe they have an option of upgrading the computer control part. Looking at that connector you no doubt have some interfacing hardware between that and the computer, assuming that computer itself is a regular PC, not also a complete custom job (possible but quite unlikely for 1998).
Just remember, don't look into laser with remaining eye.