I haven't had much success.

The infrared Sharp GPD212 rangers I've used have been jumpy. I'm working on better pic code. Also, a trick I've learned in PD has you take the incoming sensor data as midi controller values, convert those to an audio signal using the sig~ object, run some sort off filter on that signal (lop~ 1, or bandpass) to filter out the rapidly changing (i.e. aberrant) data values, and then convert it back to numbers (floats) again using env~ --> int or snapshot~ (triggered by a metronome of short duration).

If you download my patch, you can see an example. It also has a graph that can update itself every few seconds, useful for getting a visual idea of the data.

I really need to add a downloads section to this site...