For horizontal shutters, I have a pair of diodes on a breadboard where the spacing worked out to 34mm when I mounted them. I've tried 36mm exactly but it makes positioning very finicky. That's close enough too that you can spot issues like curtain bounce and capping.
Of course 36mm would be "perfect" since, at least if you're measuring with a scope like I do, you can measure travel times just by taking the differences between the two signals. If it's a lesser but known distance, the math is easy to take the measured time by the known distance and extrapolate that to 36mm.