Laser Hacks

669 Articles

RGB image from the projector, with human for scale.

RGB Laser Projector Does Colorful Asteroids And Much More

May 6, 2026 by 13 Comments

Have you thought about building a galvonometer-based laser projector, but don’t know where to start? There are a lot of resources out there, but you could do worse than to check out [Breq] and [Mia]’s laser vector project, which provides a very well-documented and low-cost starting point. They boast that the most expensive part of the project was the ANSI-certified safety glasses, which shows a dedication to safety we wish more people would show when playing with coherent light.

The rest of the parts — from the galvos to the RGB lasers module with dichoric mirrors to keep everything on the same beamline, to the ESP32 module driving everything — was ordered from AliExpress, and not from the most expensive vendors, either. Considering that, it works remarkably well.

If you’re not playing Asteroids on your vector display, why even bother?

Like all DIY laser projectors, this one does vector graphics, sweeping the beam fast enough that the human eye registers crisp, clean lines. Galvonometers, or galvos for short, take analog input, so a DAC is needed — fortunately the ESP32-S2 comes with a pair built in. The custom PCB of course has audio-in for the usual Lissajous lightshow or oscilloscope music, but with an ESP32 as the brains, you can do a lot just inside the projector.

Like what? Well, play Asteroids, for instance, using Wiimote controllers. Project a lovely clock. Render text input in various single-stroke fonts. More to the point, since this is a projector, take arbitrary SVG data and project literally any image you’d like — as long as it doesn’t have too many lines, at least. The galvos in this project are rated at 20,000 points per second, which is not exceedingly fast: they were chosen to meet the budget, not the greatest-possible speed.

More to the point is that this is one of the better-documented projects of this type we’ve seen. [Breq] doesn’t just tell us how to build the projector, but why they designed it that way. We really encourage you to give it a read if you’ve been thinking of getting into this sort of display.

We’ve seen plenty of laser projectors before, most of them producing vector images like this one. If you really must have a raster display, though, that’s also an option. Don’t count out vector images, though — they could even replace your Christmas lights.

Thanks to [CapinRedBeard] for the tip! Remember to send any bright ideas you see to our tips line, coherently lit or no.

Mist, Mirrors, Laser : Multi-view 3D Projection

April 26, 2026 by 13 Comments

“Lights, camera, action!” might have been the call when recording back in the day, but for an awesome three-dimensional viewing experience, you might try yelling “Mist, Mirrors, Laser!” and following in the footsteps of [Ancient]’s latest adventure in voxel displays, which is also embedded below.

He starts with a naive demonstration: take a laser projector and toss an image into a flat cloud of mist. That demonstrates that yes, the mist does resolve an image, and that the viewing angle is very poor– that is, brightness drops off sharply when you’re out of line from the projector. In this case, that’s a good thing! It means more angles can be projected into that mist for a three-dimensional, hologram effect.

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Flattening The Exhaust Of A Laser Cutter To Save Space

April 14, 2026 by 9 Comments

From laser cutters to 3D printers, having an exhaust duct at the back of a machine is a very common sight. However, these tend to be rather bulky, claiming many centimeters of precious space behind a machine even if you’d want to push it right up against a wall. This issue annoyed [TheNeedleStacker] over on YouTube so much that he had a poke at solving this problem with angled exhaust ducts, all hopefully without impairing its basic function.

Smoke machine and laser for some air ducting rave vibes. (Credit: TheNeedleStacker, YouTube)
Smoke machine and laser for some air ducting rave vibes.

Although there are some online offerings for angled exhaust port extenders, these do not quite fit the required 6″ diameter. Reducing the problem to just a matter of cross section area for simplicity’s sake, that means a 19″ wide duct at a depth of 1.5″. Making sure the transition from the tube to the flat duct doesn’t become an impediment is the tricky part, so the approach here was to mostly ignore it and just make a functional prototype to get an idea of how a direct approach worked.

Installing the contraption worked out fine, and subsequent testing showed that although it seems to slightly reduce the effective airflow compared to the flex tubing, it is absolutely rad to look at with the transparent cover and some laser light to illuminate all that’s happening inside.

While some optimization work on the duct transitions can undoubtedly eke out more performance, it’s certainly not bad for a quick project.

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Ski Slopes For Laser Imaging

April 14, 2026 by 9 Comments

Lasers are cool and all, but they can be somewhat difficult to control at times. This is especially true when you have hundreds, thousands, or millions of lasers you need to steer. Fortunately, the MITRE Corporation might have created exactly what’s needed to accomplish this feat. While you might expect this to be done in a similar fashion as a DLP micro mirror array, these researchers have created something a bit different.

A ski slope like a MEMS array is used to contort light as needed. Each slope is able to be controlled in such a way so precise that entire images are able to be displayed by the arrays. This is done by using a “piezo-opto-mechanical photonic integrated circuit” or (POMPIC). Each slope is constructed from SiO2, Al, AlN, and Si3N4. All of these are deposited in such a way to allow the specific bending needed for control.

While quantum computing hasn’t hit these slopes yet, that doesn’t mean you can’t look into the other puzzles needed for the quantum revolution. Quantum computing is something that people have been trying for a long time to get right. Big claims come from all the big players. Take Microsoft, for example, with claims of using Majorana zero mode anyons for topological quantum computing.

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Drawing Tablet Controls Laser In Real-Time

April 1, 2026 by 7 Comments

Some projects need no complicated use case to justify their development, and so it was with [Janne]’s BeamInk, which mashes a Wacom pen tablet with an xTool F1 laser engraver with the help of a little digital glue. For what purpose? So one can use a digital pen to draw with a laser in real time, of course!

Pen events from the drawing tablet get translated into a stream of G-code that controls laser state and power.

Here’s how it works: a Python script grabs events from a USB drawing tablet via evdev (the Linux kernel’s event device, which allows user programs to read raw device events), scales the tablet size to the laser’s working area, and turns pen events into a stream of laser power and movement G-code. The result? Draw on tablet, receive laser engraving.

It’s a playful project, but it also exists as a highly modular concept that can be adapted to different uses. If you’re looking at this and sensing a visit from the Good Ideas Fairy, check out the GitHub repository for more technical details plus tips for adapting it to other hardware.

We’re reminded of past projects like a laser cutter with Etch-a-Sketch controls as well as an attempt to turn pen marks into laser cuts, but something about using a drawing tablet for real-time laser control makes this stand on its own.

Using A Fiber Laser To Etch 0.1 Mm PCB Traces

March 24, 2026 by 15 Comments

Creating PCBs at home is quite easy these days (vias not withstanding), but even the best DIY methods usually can’t match the resolution offered by commercial PCB production lines. Large traces are easy enough to carve out of copper-backed FR1 or FR4 with even a mill, what if you need something more like 100 µm sized traces with similar clearance? This is what [Giangix] has been experimenting with, using both a fiber laser and chemical etching to see what approach gives the best results.

The thin copper clad boards are put on the 20 Watt fiber laser and held in place with the vacuum table that [Giangix] previously made, using the power of suction to make sure the board doesn’t move. The used laser specifies a minimum line width of 0.01 mm, so that’s clearly fine enough to engrave away the chemical resist layer that is sprayed on top of the copper layer.

After some experimentation, it was found that increasing the trace clearance between the 0.1 mm traces to a hair above 0.1 mm was necessary for the subsequent chemical etching step to work the best, as otherwise some copper was still likely to remain. The chemical etching bath mixture consists of hydrochloric acid and hydrogen peroxide, in a ratio of 2 mL water to 2 mL 30% HCl and 2 drops of 35% H2O2. This is agitated for 90 s to get a pretty good result.

Although the final resistance measurements on the traces is a bit higher than theoretical, comments suggest that maybe some of the copper got removed along with the removal of the resist layer. Perhaps the most interesting question here is whether directly ablating the copper using the fiber laser would give even better results and bypass the etching chemicals.

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A man's hand is shown holding a 3D-printed structure. The structure is hollow and has a fiber-optic cable leading to it. Blue light shines from a hole in the structure. In the background, a laser module is coupled to a fiber-optic cable.

Building A Laser-Driven Photoacoustic Speaker

March 22, 2026 by 8 Comments

An MRI scan is never a pleasant occasion – even if you aren’t worried about the outcome, lying still in a confined, noisy space for long periods of time is at best an irksome experience. For hearing protection and to ameliorate boredom or claustrophobia, the patient wears headphones. Since magnets and wires can’t be used inside an MRI machine, the headphones have to literally pipe the sound in through tubes, which gives them poor sound quality and reduces the amount of noise they can block. [SomethingAboutScience], however, thinks that photoacoustic speakers could improve on these, and built some to demonstrate.

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