tl;dr: My final conclusion with this project was that I got it to work, but there appeared to be still more hardware issues, and I stopped working on it further...

After getting the laser spinning, I was able to read the output of the laser hardware.  I found that I was continually getting start-up information (e.g. the sensor type/version... Piccolo something).  Ultimately, I think it was in a restart loop due to power issues.

Based on various clues (and conversation with former Neato employees), I realized the laser was getting its power via induction, and ultimately creating regular DC voltage for the electronics.

As a total hack, after figuring out some of the pins on the electronics within the spinning laser, I decided to try directly powering it with a battery, and this worked! I used the old Intel Edison battery board (red board in pictures), which holds a single ~3.7V LiPo.  I added a power button PCB from Pololu to be able to turn power on/off.

With that, I very quickly got the laser data to stream, and could view the published data with RViz successfully, but the data eventually deteriorated and stopped publishing.  I reproduced this a few times, concluded additional hardware issues, and never returned to the project.

I still considered it relatively successful!