7 color hand held laser projector

posted Jan 5th 2009 9:13am by
filed under: classic hacks, laser hacks

7color_laser

[rog8811] sent in this really cool hack where he used the optics sled from a PS3 as a foundation for a 7 color hand held laser projector. Combining a green laser, a blue ray laser, and a red laser, he is able to produce a variety of color  including white. There are step by step instructions on how to make a multicolored laser. He then goes even further, showing how to integrate this into a hand held projector with pre programmed patterns. You can see some examples of the different colors and patterns in this video.



20 Responses to 7 color hand held laser projector

  • AJ says:
    January 5, 2009 at 9:24 am

    Video no worky.

    Reply Report comment
  • clockfort says:
    January 5, 2009 at 9:30 am

    video worky just fine, aj. Flash plugin much?

    Reply Report comment
  • Arthur says:
    January 5, 2009 at 10:09 am

    It didn’t work for me the first time eigther. Try refreshing it. I think its just metacafe being moody.

    Reply Report comment
  • strider_mt2k says:
    January 5, 2009 at 10:19 am

    That’s some powerful optics ju ju right there. wow.
    super major

    video worky fine here.

    Reply Report comment
  • AnarKIT says:
    January 5, 2009 at 10:26 am

    NoScript will keep the video from loading. Temporarily allow ‘mcstatic.com’ to allow it to load.

    Reply Report comment
  • Chris says:
    January 5, 2009 at 10:46 am

    Me Likey… That is a really nice compact design..

    Reply Report comment
  • Bobz says:
    January 5, 2009 at 11:33 am

    COLOUR > COLOR

    Reply Report comment
  • rog8811 says:
    January 5, 2009 at 11:39 am

    Wow, thanks for taking this up :) If you want any further info I will be pleased to answer any questions.

    Regards rog8811

    Reply Report comment
  • happypinguin says:
    January 5, 2009 at 11:45 am

    It is nice, but not truly a LASER.

    LASER is by definition a coherent
    source of collimated light.
    While the light is still collimated
    after mixing the three beams, it won’t
    be coherent.

    Anyway, the white beam is beautiful and
    I doubt he would like to use that for
    some serious applications.
    So, nice job! The three beams looks to
    be very well aligned, I must admit it
    is difficult to do that with that size
    constraints. I have to use expensive
    lab optics and supports to do the same
    thing.

    Reply Report comment
  • Midnight says:
    January 5, 2009 at 12:08 pm

    Very nice :P

    I like the creativity of combining “salvaged” electronics.

    I noticed the ©2007 on the website roger, how long did it take to construct this ?

    Again… Very nice.

    Reply Report comment
  • rog8811 says:
    January 5, 2009 at 12:15 pm

    :)I only noticed the date after constructing the web pages, the laser and the website all put together in December 2008.

    Regards rog8811

    Reply Report comment
  • mike says:
    January 5, 2009 at 1:29 pm

    That is really cool, ‘scept I kind of think it might void the warranty on the ps3 to do that.

    Reply Report comment
  • spacewalker says:
    January 5, 2009 at 3:11 pm

    Impressive Young padwan. Your skills are getting better every day.

    Reply Report comment
  • EllisGL says:
    January 5, 2009 at 4:12 pm

    I wonder if you could use this for DIY Color Holography….

    Reply Report comment
  • natrix says:
    January 6, 2009 at 12:28 am

    I don’t know much about laser diodes, but can they be hooked to a PWM? If they can, couldn’t you get WAY more colors with that setup?

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  • happypinguin says:
    January 6, 2009 at 1:21 am

    @EllisGL

    No, you can’t. Like I said above, the
    white LASER beam is not coherent.
    You would need a phase modulator to
    correct the phase of the three beams.

    Reply Report comment
  • Grovenstien says:
    January 6, 2009 at 4:28 am

    I like this alot!

    Reply Report comment
  • Chris says:
    January 6, 2009 at 9:06 am

    rog8811:

    Nice Setup and nice job on the alignment. It looks really good.

    For everyone else:

    Hey! You can modulate them you just need different laser diode drivers.

    The white beam is still coherent … just 3 different coherent beams in 1 space. Your eye mixes the colors and shows you white.

    If you used PWM you would need to use a really fast modulation frequency and/or maybe a DC filter on the output… as soon as you move the beam around you would get dots instead of lines.

    You can buy the PS3 Laser Sleds as a replacement part so you don’t have to take apart your PS3.

    Reply Report comment
  • natrix says:
    January 7, 2009 at 11:24 pm

    maybe some of the fibre channel stuff would be a good place to look for a rough pwm design, i’d imagine a commercial product would need to be able to switch really fast.

    Reply Report comment
  • bsa11 says:
    July 25, 2009 at 10:10 am

    Can one purchase this laser from caleb kraft? Or atleast communicate about this amazing laser?

    Reply Report comment

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