I signed the papers on my first house today! In celebration, I started looking for some home hardware hacks, but stumbled across this old (2003) laser power meter sensor. If you like to scare off the power guys, this is the way to go. [jake] used a laser pointer, probably a PIC and some sort of photo sensor to count the revolutions of his meter.
Laser Hacks655 Articles
TinyProjector: Mini POV Laser Projector
I found [Stefan]’s work through his older, but interesting TinyProjector project. He opted to use multiple diodes in various configurations with rotating mirrors to create images. He’s built quite a few interesting projects over the years. The WeatherTank is pretty sweet.
Laser Beam Modding
The laser community forums have a nice primer on basic laser effects. [Steve] thought I’d really be interested in this sweet prototype dual laser saber. It’s a custom piece that uses a wicked laser pointer (You can use any laser, but those happen to be damn powerful) and a polycarbonate blade(tube/rod) to create the hallowed light saber effect. (Now I know what I want for christmas.) Mcmaster-carr carries polycarbonate rod and tube if you want to make your own,
Latest Cornell Microcontroller Final Projects
It’s that time of year when [Bruce Land] sends in the latest batch of Cornell mcu final projects. There are 32 new projects this year – including a model retina built from RGB LEDs and photo sensors. My favorite has to be laser pong. Or maybe the wearable air guitar. Damn, I can’t make up my mind.
Webcam Laser Rangefinder
This has been around for a while, but I thought it deserved some attention. [Todd] used a laser pointer, a webcam, some trig and (sigh) some windows development tools to create his own laser range finder. Given the position of the beam strike and that the camera is located at a right angle to the laser, calculating the distance is pretty simple. This could be handy if you’re building a bot for defcon…
Make Your Coffee With A Laser
[Mr Beam] sent this in yesterday, but I didn’t have a chance to get it up til now. These guys are using a 2Kw laser to heat up their instant coffee and tea. Sure, it’s not a hack, but [Eliot] wanted it up, and who doesn’t want their own 2Kw Laser?
Build Your Own Laser Spectrograph
The news is awash about a 17 year old girl who won a $100,000 scholarship for her spectrograph, but nobody actually linked to information about the thing. After some digging around, I located [Mary]’s web site. It’s a work in progress, but I found an early version of her spectrograph build. The picture shows her project with a spectrograph head made for a meade telescope. Hopefully she’ll get documentation of her spectrograph head up soon. This is one of the better uses I’ve seen for a 5mw green laser.
I forgot to mention her sweet dobsonian telescope build. Very nice work.
