I am currently developing a custom tracker using my old lighthouse trackers from a VR headset (HTC vive). The end goal is tracking small robots indoors for ~$10-15 per unit.
For that I built a custom PCB in the simplest way possible, as I am still quite a beginner in electronics. I am using BPW-34 photodiodes – they have no IR filter built in, so i’m using floppy disk film as a cheap IR bandpass which works surprisingly well.
But even with just that a very basic tracking that captures the pulses from the lighthouse worked! It’s possible to get X and Y position as well as some rotation.
As I only have 2 diodes its pretty experimental, but quite cheap to produce. For the next board I want to use at least 3 sensors and see how far I can get with this.