Added: 5 years ago
From: deludedrich
Views: 5,430
Sort by time | Sort by thread (beta)

Link to this comment:

Share to:

All Comments (13)

Sign In or Sign Up now to post a comment!
  • Hi all - this laser unit has now been radically changed to run without USB or a PC. I've added a old music-light PCB I knicked from a cheapo PC mod to allow it to syncronise to the music.

    Unfortunately I could never get the stepper motors to run fast enough to draw a good image, so now it's limited to a single beam that moves to the beat of the music, and a horiz or vert scan when the music goes quiet. Amazingly, this seems to work better than all the effects in the original unit.

  • Comment removed

  • It really would be nice to have a little bit of a tutorial...

  • Hi Brill Laser Effect Could You Tell Me How To Make It Like A Schematic Or A Guide Or Summat Please Thanks

  • Yes, although I've done a few mods since the original design. You also need the ability to program a PIC18 chip.

    Good news is I've finally found the .inf file you need to make the PIC USB firmware work with Vista :)

  • do you have a circuit?

  • It's not the easiest solution, and you can find products with fairly powerful lasers that can draw resonable images on eBay for not too much.

    However, I'm a geek so had to design and build one myself :)

  • ok thanks, sounds like more hassle than it's worth for now anyway :(

  • Yes, the green lasers get hot if not cooled. I've got an old heatsink + heatpipe from a laptop - I've wrapped the copper pipe bit around the laser diode and it keeps it quite cool.

    I have another laser crab that I've added a green laser too - I used a copper pipe bracket to mount the laser to an old heatsink, and put a PC fan on top to keep things cool

    Not really easy to do a tutorial as the controller is 2 custom built PCBs with surface mount components..

  • nice. any links to a tutorial on how to do this? and i thought these green laz0rs needed to be turned off for a few seconds after a minute or so of use? how does that work in this case?

  • PIC 18F2550 - uses a 128kHz interupt to generate a 64bit PWM singal for each stepper. The steppers inductance is enough to make the PWM in to analogue, and gives a fairly proportional rotation between from one step to another.

    The steppers were bought from ebay with the mirrors already on, so I assume they were chosen to have good capabilities for laser control.

  • I can't get my head around how you used the steppers to get those effects. BTW, what PIC did you use?

  • sweet!

Loading...
Alert icon
0 / 00Unsaved Playlist Return to active list
    1. Your queue is empty. Add videos to your queue using this button:
      or sign in to load a different list.
    Loading...Loading...Saving...
    • Clear all videos from this list
    • Learn more