Collection of Laser Pointer HOWTOs and DIYs!

Here’s a great collection of Laser Pointer HOWTOs and DIYs over at HackNMod.

• Learn how to make your own home laser show for dirt cheap.
• Make a laser projector with a custom stand.
• Kipkay has a few videos on how to create burning red and blue lasers.
• Make a wicked sweet laser blaster gun.
• Use a laser as a long distance listening device.
• Last but not least, build your own laser surveillance system.

via hacknmod

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Wow, check out this green/red laser projector which can do animations.

This is one of my experimental Dance/Trance songs from 2000. I build laser systems for fun so I have put together pictures and clips from assembly to a full working system to go with the song. I know the song gets really annoying after awhile sorry. Iv’e been getting a lot of email asking how the projector works and what parts are in it.
Here’s how the projector works:
The green laser bounces off a mirror then through a green beam splitter, the beam is then separated (The reason for this is later I added a second beam turret projector which did not work well so I removed it and also the beam splitter  The Green beam then bounces off a red dichroic filter and into the Scanners. The red laser passes through the red dichroic filter this allows you to mix the two colors into one beam or into dual images if the alignment is off.
(Most all of the video uses the red laser because the green was too bright for the video camera)
Here is some information on my laser system and where you can find the parts.

Laser controller and software I use is from
http://www.laserillusions.com/
This is a great package and costs a fraction of any other laser software about $400.00″

via hackedgadgets

Related Posts:

Green Laser Projector

How to Make a Green Laser Projector

How to Make Hard Disk Green Laser Projector

How to Make Music-Syncing Green Laser Projector

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Remember my Green Laser Projectr DIY?  Well, here’s a similar DIY project except it uses a speaker to send vibrating pulses to the end-results beams instead of a motor.

So how does one go about making one of these things? Well, I made every effort to make construction as simple as possible for two reasons. One, electrical engineering is far from my speciality and I didn’t want to kill myself/ruin a laser I could only afford one of. Two, I always hated seeing incredibly awesome projects on the internet that I never had any hope of building due to funds and bizarre parts. That’s not to say you don’t need some basic soldering and construction skills, as well as a healthy respect for the power of laser light, but it’s definitely doable if you put your mind to it.

via hacknmod

Here’s a really cool DIY showing you how to build a hard disk laser scanner made from bunch of old hard disks.

My latest tinkery hardware and embedded systems project is a homebrew laser scanner. You know, the kind you see at planetariums- sweep a laser beam around on the wall really fast, and draw vector graphics. Commercial laser scanners have been around for decades now, but buying a complete system is still really pricy, even on eBay. Besides, where’s the fun in that?

There are plenty of examples of homebrew laser scanners on the internet. Many people have wired up a pair of loudspeakers, hard disk actuators, or other readily available mechanisms to an amplifier and used them for simple laser graphics. This will make some pretty wiggly patterns on the wall, but it isn’t a real vector graphics display. The best example I know of for a totally built-from-scratch laser projector (not using commercial galvo actuators) actually uses custom hand-wound galvanometers. Very nice.

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Remember I made a simple homemade DIY green projector?  Well you can buy one at Brando gadgets for about $80.

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Related:

How to Make a Green Laser Projector

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Since I have been playing with green lasers for about a year, I never saw any good use for them except to point them to the sky or buildings.

Since the green laser has a lot of power, especially the one DragonLasers sent me recently, I decided it was time to make a simple green laser projector without me spending days to build one.

This simpler green laser projector was made so I could use it for my next party and I always wanted to make this. Although this laser projector only does one animation, 2 whirpools, I planned to improve upon after making this very basic version.

For complete DIY HOWTO, click here

When the motor is stopped, it also displays a bunch of green laser stars like this:

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Step 1

First, you will need a green laser. I recommend anything 125mW and above.

For this DIY, Frank from DragonLasers.com sponsored me a Spartan 250mW green laser. (Thanks Frank!)

You also need a diffractive glass that will distribute the green laser beams. I was lucky that the Spartan comes with it. You could probably use those cheap diffractive glasses from 3D glasses too.

Second, you will need a plastic epoxy. (In the video, I say you need two but you just really need the plastic epoxy as it works really good for everything.)

Third, you need bunch of pipes. I went to home depot and got bunch of cheap galvanized pipes for about $10 total.

Step 2

You need to drill a hole in the center of the diffractive glass, then epoxy it to the motor. Now, I accidently broke the glass and had to epoxy everything. Just make sure to use a real thin drill and go slow so you don’t make the same mistakes that I did.

Then, also epoxy the bottom end of the motor to the 90 degree pipe arm. (Make sure to solder on 2 wires to the motor!)

(Sorry, I forgot to take pictures while doing that…)

Step 3

Build your green laser projector using the pipes and pipe parts sorta like below.

Put all the wires through the pipes so it comes out the other end. (Sorry again, I forgot to take pictures of this step…) Then assemble everything. You can fit the green laser through the T-pipe piece. (For the T-pipe piece, I used a bigger size then used electrical tape around the pipes to stabilize it.)

Step 4

Now you have two wires coming out the other side of pipe. Simply connect that to a 1.5V battery OR you can use a DC adaptor.

Step 5

Once you get the motor running, simply align your green laser and there you go, a simple green laser projector.

You should get nice set of two whirpools of green laser beams.

Now, you could probably add another axis and another motor to get even better animated effects.

I plan to add a microcontroller like CUBLOC or Basic Stamp in the future so stay tuned and subscribe to Zedomax.com.

This DIY was made to experiment with the green laser, so don’t shoot me if it’s not super high tech. It’s supposed to be simple enough so any regular joe can make one. But I promise next time it will be more high tech…

(During the day killing a bug in my shoe and in my dark bathroom)

Remember I did a review on a 125mW Viper green laser last year?

Well Frank from DragonLasers sent me a Spartan GW 250mW green laser so I can show you guys how cool it is. The beam is much bigger this time and as you can see in the video, it’s WAY more powerful. Everytime my friends come over, they are hogging me to get them a free green laser. It’s really something you don’t need but once you see one in real life, you need it.

Continue reading ‘DragonLasers Spartan 250mW Green Laser Reviewed!’

Check out this cool laser projector using AVR. WOw.

Motor spins drum with 16 mirrors around at about 20-30 rev/second. The mirrors are tilted differently, so that they draw one line each on the screen. Rotation time is measured by the reading fork and divided by 16*32=512. This is the pixel clock. When the reading fork senses that the wire attached to the mirror drum passes, a new frame starts, and the pixel clock starts. For each pixel, the laser is turned on or off. Simple as that! Each line contains 32 pixels, but only 16 are used. The remaining 16 pixels on a line do either represent the gap between mirrors, or, they are used for calibration. Oh, yes. The calibration. I won’t be attempting that again any day soon. Each mirror is calibrated in the Y-direction by tediously moving them physically. T-e-d-i-o-u-s-l-y. Did I mention that? The X-direction calibration is done with a lookup-table in software. Ahhh… software… And there’s your picture. Making video is the easy part. That’s just a matter of changing the picture every 4 or 5 frames or so.

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