Making a laser show scanner...

[**DONOTDELETE**]

Hi guys im quite new here and i was wondering if you have any good links to either laser forums or scanner plans?
Im gonna start with a 5mw red laser soon to be upgraded to those irresistible green ones

Cheers!

 

[x-ray]

Hi Greensmoke,

Try here for general laser info.

Also look here and here for plans to build cheap laser scanners.

LASER LIGHT SHOW INFORMATION & TECHNICAL FORUM

 

[The_LED_Museum]

I used to use the azimuth control assembly out of gutted laser disk drives. They do a presentable lissajous type show and work well with a red laser, but unfortuantely they don't last very long before the coil wires fatigue and break. They weren't meant for rapid movement like that. Using them for a homebrew laser show is like accelerating their life by 100,000 times or more.

 

[Harrkev]

If you want cheap and dirty, take an old speaker (woofer), and cover it with plastic wrap (like sandwiches come in). Then, glue a small piece of mirror to the plastic, and aim the laser at the mirror. Apply music, and enjoy.

This is *very* cheesy, but for a project that you can probably do for under $5, it might be worth a shot.

 

[LED-FX]

Try:

http://www.laserfx.com/

then backstage>hobbyist

Adam

 

[star882]

Get one of these useless harddrives(a 5.25" is good),take it apart, and use the voice coil with a mirror attached to it as a beam deflector.

 

[The_LED_Museum]

The first "laser show scanner" I made was in the mid-1970s, and consisted of a 4" or 5" 'long-throw' car speaker, a quarter-sized chunk of broken mirror, and duct tape. I used two narrow pieces of duct tape to hold the mirror near the speaker cone's center, with the other end of the tape attached to a single point on the speaker frame, so when the speaker was mounted at a 50° or 60° angle, the mirror hung directly over and just barely touched the speaker's dust cap. This allowed the mirror to bounce around and twist a good amount with minimal input power, and produced a random squiggly pattern that grew & shrank in beat to the music.

Nowadays, there are numerous variations of the "speaker and mirror" scanners that can be home-built at almost no cost, but if you really want a show that can do more than display crude X-Y loops, you'll need a set of galvanometers and drivers for them. MWK Industries sometimes has these on sale for a decent price. Superbrightleds.com also has the Beamscan projector, but I haven't looked into how much those are.

 

[star882]

The hard drive voice coil with a mirror on it is a cheap way to make a galvanometer.