Project: Bouncing beam to illuminate room

Here is the whole reason I got interested in lasers in the first place. Well, besides that childish infatuation with SciFi laser guns... but they're not really here yet, so this is all we got so far... I want to illuminate wy whole house with lasers.

For beam splitters I am using regular microscope slides, and the first surface mirrors I got from... you guessed it eBay... They came in 15 inch lengths that I have had a pain cutting, but they work and were cheap.

My goal is to get this to work around my whole house, but I have to perfect it here before my girlfriend will let me venture out in to the rest of the house. since this green beast is SO bright, I put 5 or 6 slides right out of the laser to dilute it some. The first split beam goes into a Laser FX for my show... The other 4 or 5 I just bend into my desk and will use later...



That big white spot is where I have a chunk of mirror on some poster puddy attached to the wall. Anyone have an idea why there is SO much white there? It is reflecting the beam at some odd angle to another mirror which points it to the ceiling.







Pointing at ceiling...





Here I bend the beam and run it through 4 slides, each refracting the beam to a different spot in the room. After the slides I have a mirror in a corner bringin the beam back to the original wall I started from.



Which then bounces it back to the opposite wall. This is a very rough draft of my "project". After all the bounces and slides the beam is almost a half inch wide, so I think this is a good terminating point.

In the end, I would like to take the main beam out the room via fiber cable or something similar. I am thinking of going through the wall above the door. At each room I want to use a slide to "break" off a portion of the beam for that room.

And.. that's all I got so far...

sounds like a good security system to me :laughing:. All you need now is a photocell and the alarm, and you'll be set up to protect your valuable investments.

As for the bright white spot on the mirror, I guess the camera is trying to expose the image to show as much detail as posible on most of the visible areas, which overexposes the laser hitting the mirror. The mirror's surroundings are lighted by the scattered laser, which is pretty dim compared to the laser itself.