Collaborate Disseminate
Perhaps there was a time when fancy laser effects were beyond those without the largest of bank accounts, but today they can be created surprisingly easily. [Corebb] shows us how …read more Continue reading Portable ESP32 RGB Lasershow Has All the Trimmings
Everyone should know by now that we love to follow up on projects when they make progress. It’s great to be able to celebrate accomplishments and see how a project …read more Continue reading Collaborative Effort Gets Laser Galvos Talking G-Code
When it comes to trolling eBay for cool stuff, some people have all the luck. Whereas all we ever seem to come across is counterfeit chips and obviously broken gear …read more Continue reading Inside an eBay Marking Laser
What does it take to make your own integrated circuits at home? It’s a question that relatively few intrepid hackers have tried to answer, and the answer is usually something …read more Continue reading Old Printer Becomes Direct Laser Lithography Machine
Lightning is a powerful and seemingly mysterious force of nature, capable of releasing huge amounts of energy over relatively short times and striking almost at random. Lightning obeys the laws …read more Continue reading Detect Lightning Strikes with an Arduino
Playing Asteroids now isn’t quite what it used to be when it came out 40 years ago. At the time, the vector-scan display was part of the charm; making do with an emulator running on a traditional raster display just …read more
Continue reading Laser Galvos and an ESP32 Recreate Old-School Asteroids
There’s something magical about a laser light show. Watching that intense beam of light flit back and forth to make shapes and patterns, some of them even animated, is pretty neat. It leaves those of us with a technical bent wondering just exactly how the beam is manipulated that fast. …read more
Continue reading Lighting Tech Dives into the Guts of Laser Galvanometers
Laser projectors like those popular in clubs or laser shows often use mirror galvanometers to reflect the laser and draw in 2D. Without galvos, and on a tight budget, [Vitaliy Mosesov] decided that instead of downgrading the quality, he would seek an entirely different solution: a spinning mirror drum.
He fires a laser at a rotating drum with twelve mirror faces, each at a different adjustable vertical angle. The laser will hit a higher or lower point on the projection surface depending on which mirror it’s reflecting off – this creates resolution in the Y direction.
Timing the pulsing of …read more
Continue reading Laser projector ditches galvanometer for spinning drum
Mirror galvanometers (‘galvos’ for short) are the worky bits in a laser projector; they are capable of twisting a mirror extremely quickly and accurately. With two of them, a laser beam may be steered in X and Y to form patterns. [bdring] had purchased some laser galvos and decided to roll his own control system with the goal of driving the galvos with the DAC (digital to analog) output of a microcontroller. After that, all that was needed to make it draw some shapes was a laser and a 3D printed fixture to hold everything in the right alignment.
The …read more
Continue reading Laser Galvo Control via Microcontroller’s DAC
We’re suckers for any project that’s nicely packaged, but an added bonus is when most of the components can be sourced cheaply and locally. Such is the case for this little laser light show, housed in electrical boxes from the local home center and built with stuff you probably have in your junk bin.
When we first came across [replayreb]’s write-up and saw that he used hard drives in its construction, we assumed he used head galvanometers to drive the mirrors. As it turns out, he used that approach in an earlier project, but this time around, the hard drive …read more
Continue reading Little Laser Light Show is Cleverly Packaged, Cheap to Build