Custom built RGB laser firing beam

Lasers, Galvos, Action: A Quest For Laser Mastery

If you’re into hacking hardware and bending light to your will, [Shoaib Mustafa]’s latest project is bound to spike your curiosity. Combining lasers to project multi-colored beams onto a screen is ambitious enough, but doing it with a galvanomirror, STM32 microcontroller, and mostly scratch-built components? That’s next-level tinkering. This project isn’t just a feast for the eyes—it’s a adventure of control algorithms, hardware hacks, and the occasional ‘oops, that didn’t work.’ You can follow [Shoaib]’s build log and join the journey here.

The nitty-gritty is where it gets fascinating. Shoaib digs into STM32 Timers, explaining how modes like Timer, Counter, and PWM are leveraged for precise control. From adjusting laser intensity to syncing galvos for projection, every component is tuned for maximum flexibility. Need lasers aligned? Enter spectrometry and optical diffusers for precision wavelength management. Want real-time tweaks? A Python-controlled GUI handles the instruments while keeping the setup minimalist. This isn’t just a DIY build—it’s a work of art in problem-solving, with successes like a working simulation and implemented algorithms along the way.

If laser projection or STM32 wizardry excites you, this build will inspire. We featured a similar project by [Ben] back in September, and if you dig deep into our archives, you can eat your heart out on decades of laser projector projects. Explore Shoaib’s complete log on Hackaday.io. It is—literally—hacking at its most brilliant.

An RGB laser projector opened up on a workbench

Laser Projector Needs Hardware Hack After Software Mod

You probably recognize that dreadful feeling when you reboot a gadget after updating its firmware, only to be greeted by a blank screen and an unresponsive device. This apparently happened to the previous owner of a bricked RGB laser projector that [Buy It Fix It] got his hands on: it briefly flashed its laser on power-up but otherwise remained completely dead.

A thorough inspection of the major components didn’t reveal any physical damage, so the issue had to be in software. [Buy It Fix It] managed to connect his Segger J-link programmer to the STM32 main processor and downloaded the contents of its firmware, only to find the remains of a PDF file which seemed to have been accidentally flashed into the chip’s program space. Fixing the device should then just be a matter of restoring the proper firmware, but [Buy It Fix It] wasn’t able to find a copy of it anywhere.

A PCB with a few mod wires on itWhat he did find was Maximus64’s GitHub repository that contained a software mod for a different projector model, as well as its original firmware. Flashing that version didn’t fix [Buy It Fix It]’s projector either, although it did now start to actuate its galvos.

A bit of reverse engineering revealed that the two projectors were very similar from a hardware point of view, but had their laser drivers hooked up to different I/O pins: simply cutting the board traces and soldering some wires to re-route the signals was enough to bring the projector back into a working state.

Having to modify hardware in order to make it fit a piece of software is unfortunate, but sometimes you just have to make do with what you’ve got. If you’ve got no firmware to begin with, then you might even have to write your own from scratch.

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