Dude so need to play Battlezone on that!!

Great project. There was less flicker IRL.

Beautifully done. Well documented. Kudos!

Since it uses the audio jack, do you think it would be possible to save the data that would be put out of the audio jack into an mp3 or some sort of audio file and then have it played back from an ipod. It’d be like a portable harddrive with all your laser shows saved onto it, all you’d have to do it take the laser projector with you everywhere.

@FoxxCommand

You can do that easily enough (for example, you can run OpenLase and use jackrec to capture the output), but you need a playback device that either is DC coupled (rare) or has been modified to remove the AC coupling caps. Also, you want to use a lossless format like WAV or FLAC; MP3 is a bad idea for non-audio data. And keep in mind that you really, really want at least three channels (X, Y, brightness). Just X and Y leaves retrace/blanking lines all over your image.

Honestly though, you aren’t going to get the laser projector much smaller than mine already is (at least not without some serious effort). Using a USB sound card like I do, the easiest solution for portability would be to just run the shows on a netbook. There’s also nothing stopping you from running OpenLase on an even more embedded device; I’m sure it’d run on, say, a Nokia N900 (maybe not the realtime video tracing, but certainly everything else) with the USB soundcard hooked up to it. I have a tiny embedded board with the same CPU on it and Linux+JACK installed, so I’ll probably try it soon.

Oh, and for the record, OpenLase runs on OSX too :)

Problem I’ve had is finding reasonably priced galvos ;p

I am extremely interested in an open source laser projector design. If someone shared files to get the parts 3D printed at Ponoko and any PCB files in EAGLE format, I’d totally build one!

I haven’t looked much, I always imagined it was too complicated. It’s not? I’m highly skilled, but don’t have *too* much time.
-Taylor