I think I love this project solely for all of the little bits that are required to put it all together. The write up describes the construction of the necessary parts: laser unit, galvanometer scanners, servo amps, and controllers. All schematics included natch.
freakin 1337. Honestly, it doesn’t get much cooler than that. Shame though, every time I hear the word servo I look the other way. This time I just looked at the pictures :P
complicated but damn cool
stupid question but wouldnt it be possible to adapt that laser projector or multiply it by 3 into an RGB style output and overlay them and use say a tv signal as an impout with perhaps some nifty PIC programming to dice up the image? Laser projector TV?
thanks frozendevil, i forgot about that one, this is hack is much smoother and in the end usable, but the link was much more attainable.
as for chris’ question, you couldn’t do a laser projected tv because of the refresh rate, you couldn’t have the lasers drawing all the values at anything close to a tolerable rate, that’s why a laser show looks like it does. It’s only drawing what’s being displayed (vector display), as opposed to a raster (normal TV) display, that even when it has black space, is still having to go through those lines. (ever by chance seen when you try to do too much w/ an old osiloscope? the image gets flickery because it has to move the electron gun to the points needed, i think it takes more to do that than to just have it doing a standard pattern like a TV) it would also cost hella cash for the blue lasers, since they don’t have a solid state blue laser yet.
maybe if you had many many sets of RGB lasers to catch different regions of the overall display, you might get enough total coverage per second to get a rough approximation. But it’d break the bank, and in the end, for anything short of trying to project on a very far away area, a normal projector would be more practical.
I hope the coming hack has something to do with the NEW digital disposeable dvd camera that CVS came out with.
Well there is a laser video display look here http://www.colorvision-lasers.com/products.aspx#. Its not cheap! You can do laser video with the “entertainment laser systems”(ELS) they just don’t look as good. But the main use of the ELS is for graphics and beams. The scanners can handle only so much. My laser at work does 30K points per sec. which sounds like alot but when you realize that an average Laser image contains about 1000 points and you put up multiple images at once you get that blinking effect. Of course don’t forget to visit you local planetarium to see if they have laser shows….yes I run and produce them at a planetarium.
What a cool machine.
Nice workmanship too.
I built a very quick and very dirty “laser projector” using tiny peizo speakers with bits of CD mounted on them for the deflectors. It used a cheap laser pointer and the deflectors were driven from my PC soundcard left and right audio output channels, using some custom software I wrote to produce the correct stereo output waveforms.
Did’nt work to great though – the tiny speakers made a racket and dampened the deflection. I need to make a refined “version 2″ of my little projector.
The link seems broken, redirects to pir.org
Anybody has an alternate link or mirror?
thanks
nevermind. it seems the owner of the site redirects only requests with hackaday as referrer.
The link doesn’t work – it send you too http://www.pir.org. I’ve tried 4 different web browsers – same problem on all of them.
Patrick’s comment points out that they don’t like us. Just copy and paste the link and it will work.
Symbol technologies has a working 640 x 480 laser video display prototype. I saw it at a lecture by Bill Buxton last week… very cool stuff.
More info about laser video displays here:
http://www.billbuxton.com/projViz.html
Enjoy
hi,you can find a cheap red/green/blue laser on http://www.dpltech.com
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Very cool. it’d be nice if there were an easier (and probably dirtier) way to do it w/ a simple laser pointer and maybe some stepper motors along with a serial interface.