YES, TWISTING WIRES IS GOOD. when you twist 2 wires together (2 wires of the same circuit... so 1 wires is the positive and the other wire is the negative) they 'magically' shield themselves from outside interference... this is why you see 4 twisted pairs of wires in an ethernet cable.... but you CANNOT have more than 1 circuit in a twisted pair... this will interfere with it self and can ruin both signals... - I JUST explained this SAME THING to another channel about 2 days ago :D - So going to school for Network Administration LEARNED ME SUMTHIN!!!! 🤪😁😳😂
I suggest you buy yourself a cheap laser barcode scanner and see how that creates a linear beam from a single laser diode. It typically uses a mirror fixed onto some compliant material/thin plastic hinge (something thin that can bend) so it can wobble along an axis side to side while remaining balanced. The mirror has some kind of light magnet on the back and a voice coil behind it is used to attract/repel the mirror at a specific frequency, causing it to wobble along the hinged axis. Because the mirror is balanced on that axis, you don't need to move the full weight of the mirror meaning you can do it faster than with a motor or the speaker method you used, where you have to move the entire weight of the mirror which is much slower because the system has a higher inertia.
@@jhonbus It would if you oscillated the mirror at a set frequency (the same way the barcode scanner does) and used scanlines. But I meant more that this approach could be investigated to see if it's feasible to move the mirror to an arbitrary angle using the same technique. I don't know how much the oscillating of those mirrors is sustained by simple harmonic motion as opposed to actively being moved by the voice coil - I suspect it's probably more the former, but still worth a try.
@@MadScientist267 if you varied the voltage, you could vary the deflection. Similar to his first attempt with the speakers as drivers. I don't think Eddie was suggesting a line like in a raster scanner, but the hardware style used to deflect the beam.
@@EddieHart TBH, probably the easiest thing to do is just rotate the laser and block it when it's not oriented towards a part of the visible screen. That way, you don't have to stop the mirror and switch directions. Which just means that you have to raise and lower the assembly as you go through the screen. If you go from top to bottom and then bottom to top, it wouldn't be as authentic, but as long as you mirror every other frame, it probably wouldn't be visible to the viewer.
I wanna suggest a rastering mechanism: You get an octagonal thingie with mirrors on each of the 8 faces, and spin it at 225rpm, then shine a laser on it. You'll get a straight line with crisp start and ends, re-painted 30 times a second. That's your vertical sweep. If you build a second spinning octagonal mirror spinning at 1800 rpm and arrange them so that they spin on axis 90 degrees apart, you should be able to get a NTSC image. Now you just have to switch the laser diode on and off fast enough to get a picture! You can manage 350kHz on the diode control, right?
For the horizontal line you can also maybe use for example a hexagonal shaped mirror, then that stepper can rotate at a constant speed to draw multiple horizontal lines. But that works only for TV mode, not oscilloscope!
You should try brushless DC motors! They can go VERY fast and stop on a point. They don't need anything like much torque. Maybe not as simple a steppers but they're used by some corporations for very precise work nonetheless. Your initial idea, using speakers, was the best. I'd love to see it scan fast enough to serve as the display for a videogame like Asteroids or a Vectrex title.
faster dc motors could probably lend themselves to a more continous-scan type design too, depending on how fast they can drive them. some sort of linkage that directs the horizontal deflection to a set rate, and the vertical deflection at a set rate with some way of resetting it. i wonder how fast the luminance of a laser diode like that can be modulated or switched, would be cool to see some sort of continuous scan rendering by adjusting the brightness of the diode itself like that.
This reminds me of the Tektronix 4050 "storage tube" vector displays. The CRT itself would retain an image, so no display memory was required. It had some obvious limitations - the display had to be "undrawn" to create animation, but it looked really cool and could create beautiful images with relatively simple hardware driving it. I think there was a later version that had 2 colours - one was the static image color, which was retained automatically, and another colour was only temporary, allowing animation over a static background without the CPU needing to worry about handling the background redrawing. There are videos of it on YT - very cool!
Reminds me of our laserscanners we did 20 years ago with the popelscan software. The solution we found was not to use steppers with snmall steps but steppers with really big steps of appr. 7°. so really corse stepping. Then you hold the rotor with a voltage between 2 steps and then modulate this voltage for scanning. So you get a few degrees of scanning and that doubled as a scan angle. No steps, no jagged lines. But as you already mentioned, there are cheap galvos available now.
@@bitluni I would also suggest using old hard drive aluminium plate cuts as the mirror. The surface is the reflective layer and should provide better focusing.
Interesting, I also use a UV lamp to light up the glow in the dark stickers that we put up on the ceiling above the bed of the little one :) It has a moon, planets, stars, etc. Works like magic!
I always thought it would be really nice to make a VGA-compatible RGB-laser based CRT-equivalent, but never could figure out a way to scan the beam fast enough.
The speaker method was the correct one, just with the wrong implementation. Speakers are simple solenoids. Find some solenoids and use those instead. You'll attach one edge of the mirror to a solenoid and the other to a hinge attached to a fixed point. Do that once for X and once for Y. That will be much faster and more precise than your current method.
As others have mentioned, a spinning triangular prism with front-surface mirrors on each face is probably the best way to create your horizontal scan lines. That's what's typically used in aerial lidar scanners, and it's very reliable. You could increase the number of faces to reduce the RPMs but increase the scan rate, but doing so also decreases the angle they sweep, so would require a longer base-line for the same size of CRT screen.
replacing the speakers with the head arm and coil out of a hard drive might be an option? you will get plenty of movement and a good high speed, but there is no feedback and no auto return.
Make it a projector. An application would be to transfer art or drawings onto paper, wood or other media. Like when painting on a canvas you can project the lines first
A laser projector being used for back projection would probably be the easiest way of doing it. But, I don't think the point of this is to make an easy one.
amazing! In case you want to do a second revision, try having the mirrors angled by 45 degrees, so the both contribute equally to the on screen x-axis and y-axis respectively. This should distribute the work the have to do and maybe improve the speed and quality
I can recommend a dedicated galvo mechanism - they are precise, smooth and fast. I have some that were designed for a fixed barcode mechanism, but the ones from more modern handheld barcode are even better.
Try and display a B+W image, then try driving the laser at different levels to give a few grey levels, then sequence of images to give a TV. You could try multifaced disks to do the scanning rather than stepper motors to do the scanning like a mechanical TV, then sync the laser output to the position of the disks.
If you use a wheel with several mirrors on it for the x axis you can still use it like that, or you can spin it for "instant" beam return in scope mode.
I'm thinking something like the voice coil from a hard drive and a neodynium magnet/mirror assembly on a pivot would provide much faster response times. A voice coil could both accelerate and brake the mirror. But, what you've managed to achieve with stepper motors is quite amazing.
I like this a lot! Well done! A similar project would be to make the beam scan lines and making a pixel array, like maybe 80x60 px? Or will the resolution be too low for that? because of the bleed in the screen? Maybe you'd have to make a black grid and make individual pixels with the luminous filament, so the pixels would be compartmentalised? The scanning would require a single stepper motor and gears and a mechanical counting thing (I don't know what to call this) making the vertical progress to the next line at the end of the horizontal scan. Horizontal scanner could be two or more mirrors intermittently turning at the end of the horizontal line, mechanically coupled , vertical scanner could be the same. You know, like those mechanical hand counters or a mechanical odometer in a car. Computer needs feedback too, to know when to start a line. Each pixel needs to be lit up exactly, though, so all this needs to be timed properly. I'm sure the frame rate would be low, but I'd still love to see it! It will of course be limited by the max speed of the mechanical device and how fast the mirrors can spin before self destructing! Or maybe you could have a spinning prism instead of mirrors? A tiny one, close to the laser? As you can see, this was a really inspiring vid! Thank you!
speakers could work very well if you find a way to detect its cone position and feed it back into the amp like a negative feedback opamp. proper galvanometers for laser scanners work exactly like this. they are just rotational speakers with a position encoder and a amp with some filters to set the gain for gain, damping etc.
a beefier amp with lower resistance should already do that trick by shorting more back EMF, but then speakers still aren't great at rotating things in a linear fasion.
You want a pair of simple single coil galvanometers to do the deflection (like you find in old analogue multimeters). Just a simple coil with a magnet mounted on a pivot and spring. Can drive them from simple transistor amps on analogue X and Y signals, or directly with PWM. Can have very smooth movement, although you'll have to take momentum into account if you want high precision. Or if you want a CRT style scanning, can use a pair of rotating multiface mirrors, one at slow speed for Y, one faster for X. The speed is critical on these ones, though, to keep signal synchronised. Very frustrating when youtubers just go at it without doing any research on what other people have done in the past to already solve these problems (and can be found with minimal effort). Reinventing the wheel for "content" is just...
This was pretty cool! Just a thought, could you drive the laser diode on a pwm signal to counteract the slow decay with higher refresh rates? If the laser is responsive enough you could sharpen your pixel width and possibly interlace the pixels for a quicker response to change on the phosphorescent screen since it has a long decay period.
could you find a DLP mirror unit and use that? I assume they're fast as hell and you could probably treat the whole thing as one giant pixel to make calibration easier
I'm not quite halfway thru and I haven't read the comments yet, but you could just use a magnifying glass to amplify the travel distance of the laser and then use the little speaker drivers instead of stepper motors
Twisting your wires on the BNC inputs may actually be detrimental, because you increase the length of the wire and the surface area of coupling. That increases your probe impedance and probe capacitance!
Can you add more mirrors to the axes, so that x-movement might be either split into a "wide" movement and a "fine" movement, or to let then both work at half the original range? It might let you do faster speeds if any single mirror doesn't need to wobble as intensely
I don't know why, but when I saw the thumbnail, I thought you were going to do laser beamforming, and I was a bit worried that you'd been in the lab for way, way too long. 😂
I definitely like that you mentioned wearing eye protection. How about after the device is complete and all closed up? Is it pretty safe to go without the glasses then? Or is there another color or strength laser that would work but negate the need for protection? I don't think I would want to have such an innocuous looking device around that could harm someone who turns it on without glasses.
Polygon mirrors on aliexpress for about $20 would get you the left to right scanning without turning off the beam, as it would reset when the other mirror comes into rotation. Think of it like a bunch of mirrors on the edges of a stop sign. They look like they are used in some laser printers. Probably if you can find a second hand or "for parts" laser printer you could salvage the polygon mirror. You also don't need to reverse it, just keep it spinning at a constant rate. To calculate the spin rate, you'd need to know the vertical resolution, multiply that by the fps, and divide by the number of sides of the polygon.
I think the speakers could still work because they're so fast. You just have to create some leverage mechanism to create more travel instead of attaching the mirrors directly
That's amazing. By the way, wouldn't you be able to push to faster frequencies by shedding some extra mass from unused parts of mirrors? Afais the first one may be small circle, and the other a thin rectangle, and smaller moment of inertia may help
Could possibly replace one of the galvos with a rapidly spinning mirror disc (I think some use hexagonal discs or similarly shaped). If you could properly synch two motors then you could even do two spinning mirror discs (perhaps a solution would be to have one motor and a linked drivetrain?)
I started off as a programmer and then progressed onto robotics and electrical engineering. On the computer, resources are virtual and infinite. The worst that can happen is you'll hang the OS, but there's nothing a reboot won't fix. And then you begin making electrical circuits that go "poof" just like in that video. And immediately, not only is there an associated cost with having to replace the components, but there are often wait times. You can wait for 2 weeks, before you can start back where you ended. What do you do? You end up re-designing stuff around things that you fry, just to get to the end sooner. Everything is finite and often expensive. This forced me into modular designs, where everything that's unused is able to unplug during testing. The fewer things that can go "poof" at the same time, the better. Sometimes you're just lazy to do the math. You eyeball the parameters, plug things in and watch temperatures through an infrared camera. If nothing's overheating, then you can go and do the paperwork. You raise failure risk, but reduce build time if guesses go smoothly... my advise overall - don't skip out on diodes, if you have inductive loads and anything that can cause reverse polarity... and check operational temperatures. Find out the coldest and the hottest thresholds for your device, to know when it starts to glitch out... blah blah blah... electronics is fun.
Hard drive voice coil might be just the thing. They're VERY fast. Same concept as your speaker idea. Just a coil of wire over a permanent magnet and an amplifier.
glass mirrors are too heavy to move them fast enough, you can replace them with thin plastic mirrors to have less inertia (e.g a piece of christmas decoration paper) so it can draw higher frequency content
It's a good project if something catches fire :) Also I too tried making a laser scanner using 2 speakers, also did not work well. (That was back in y2k).
Check out brilliant.org/bitluni/ for a 30 day free trial or a 20% discount for an annual subscription (sponsor)
ONE DAY AGO? It was uploaded 31 mins ago bro
YES, TWISTING WIRES IS GOOD. when you twist 2 wires together (2 wires of the same circuit... so 1 wires is the positive and the other wire is the negative) they 'magically' shield themselves from outside interference... this is why you see 4 twisted pairs of wires in an ethernet cable.... but you CANNOT have more than 1 circuit in a twisted pair... this will interfere with it self and can ruin both signals...
- I JUST explained this SAME THING to another channel about 2 days ago :D - So going to school for Network Administration LEARNED ME SUMTHIN!!!! 🤪😁😳😂
May I suggest for our common safety that you forgo the gravitational field project ? A small black hole on earth sweet jeezz!!
@@Randomman149 uh, released to members early?
@@Nobe_Oddy You can only have one circuit in twisted pair, cause you only have 2 wires. Otherwise it would be a twisted group, which is not a thing.
I suggest you buy yourself a cheap laser barcode scanner and see how that creates a linear beam from a single laser diode. It typically uses a mirror fixed onto some compliant material/thin plastic hinge (something thin that can bend) so it can wobble along an axis side to side while remaining balanced. The mirror has some kind of light magnet on the back and a voice coil behind it is used to attract/repel the mirror at a specific frequency, causing it to wobble along the hinged axis. Because the mirror is balanced on that axis, you don't need to move the full weight of the mirror meaning you can do it faster than with a motor or the speaker method you used, where you have to move the entire weight of the mirror which is much slower because the system has a higher inertia.
That would make it a raster display instead of a vector display though!
One thing.. vector displays don't use line by line scanning.
@@jhonbus It would if you oscillated the mirror at a set frequency (the same way the barcode scanner does) and used scanlines. But I meant more that this approach could be investigated to see if it's feasible to move the mirror to an arbitrary angle using the same technique. I don't know how much the oscillating of those mirrors is sustained by simple harmonic motion as opposed to actively being moved by the voice coil - I suspect it's probably more the former, but still worth a try.
@@MadScientist267 if you varied the voltage, you could vary the deflection. Similar to his first attempt with the speakers as drivers. I don't think Eddie was suggesting a line like in a raster scanner, but the hardware style used to deflect the beam.
@@EddieHart TBH, probably the easiest thing to do is just rotate the laser and block it when it's not oriented towards a part of the visible screen. That way, you don't have to stop the mirror and switch directions. Which just means that you have to raise and lower the assembly as you go through the screen. If you go from top to bottom and then bottom to top, it wouldn't be as authentic, but as long as you mirror every other frame, it probably wouldn't be visible to the viewer.
"Then you have vim... which can only be exited by turning the system off and on again" 🤣
:wq!
Yep, that's VIM.
Can't remember all the shortcuts, sacrifices have to be made 🤪
Esc, :q!
Killed me! 😅🤣
@@DasIllu :q
"And we have Vim, the only way to leave that is by turning off and on again" 😂
2:12 A sudden electroboom appears...
@ElectroBOOM, take a look!
Beat me to it
It was my thought as well
Der Elektroboom
I wanna suggest a rastering mechanism:
You get an octagonal thingie with mirrors on each of the 8 faces, and spin it at 225rpm, then shine a laser on it. You'll get a straight line with crisp start and ends, re-painted 30 times a second. That's your vertical sweep.
If you build a second spinning octagonal mirror spinning at 1800 rpm and arrange them so that they spin on axis 90 degrees apart, you should be able to get a NTSC image. Now you just have to switch the laser diode on and off fast enough to get a picture! You can manage 350kHz on the diode control, right?
For the horizontal line you can also maybe use for example a hexagonal shaped mirror, then that stepper can rotate at a constant speed to draw multiple horizontal lines. But that works only for TV mode, not oscilloscope!
It was think the same. Seems like it would be easier to just modulate the laser.
Id wonder how quickly the Lazer can be switched on and off, I'm sure there's a couple ms delay, which would really limit the max speed
I am glad you do not need to sing for making your income ... ❤
You should try brushless DC motors! They can go VERY fast and stop on a point. They don't need anything like much torque. Maybe not as simple a steppers but they're used by some corporations for very precise work nonetheless. Your initial idea, using speakers, was the best. I'd love to see it scan fast enough to serve as the display for a videogame like Asteroids or a Vectrex title.
faster dc motors could probably lend themselves to a more continous-scan type design too, depending on how fast they can drive them. some sort of linkage that directs the horizontal deflection to a set rate, and the vertical deflection at a set rate with some way of resetting it. i wonder how fast the luminance of a laser diode like that can be modulated or switched, would be cool to see some sort of continuous scan rendering by adjusting the brightness of the diode itself like that.
This reminds me of the Tektronix 4050 "storage tube" vector displays. The CRT itself would retain an image, so no display memory was required. It had some obvious limitations - the display had to be "undrawn" to create animation, but it looked really cool and could create beautiful images with relatively simple hardware driving it. I think there was a later version that had 2 colours - one was the static image color, which was retained automatically, and another colour was only temporary, allowing animation over a static background without the CPU needing to worry about handling the background redrawing. There are videos of it on YT - very cool!
next : convert to a Vectrex video game console
Did you notice that the red laser actually works as an eraser? Paint with blue/violet (405nm), erase with red
The performance in 13:29 is awesome! (whole project is amazing, thanks for sharing it :))
Reminds me of our laserscanners we did 20 years ago with the popelscan software. The solution we found was not to use steppers with snmall steps but steppers with really big steps of appr. 7°. so really corse stepping. Then you hold the rotor with a voltage between 2 steps and then modulate this voltage for scanning. So you get a few degrees of scanning and that doubled as a scan angle. No steps, no jagged lines. But as you already mentioned, there are cheap galvos available now.
Your first mirror could be a lot smaller - less mass & air resistance
not only that: first mirror should rather do the horizontal deflection and the second one the vertical. but don't tell the others 😂
@@bitluni I would also suggest using old hard drive aluminium plate cuts as the mirror. The surface is the reflective layer and should provide better focusing.
Interesting, I also use a UV lamp to light up the glow in the dark stickers that we put up on the ceiling above the bed of the little one :) It has a moon, planets, stars, etc. Works like magic!
The Rick part and you started singing, made me spit out my coffee all over my keyboard.
Thanks for that!
I always thought it would be really nice to make a VGA-compatible RGB-laser based CRT-equivalent, but never could figure out a way to scan the beam fast enough.
The speaker method was the correct one, just with the wrong implementation. Speakers are simple solenoids. Find some solenoids and use those instead. You'll attach one edge of the mirror to a solenoid and the other to a hinge attached to a fixed point. Do that once for X and once for Y. That will be much faster and more precise than your current method.
I really loved this project and cant wait for version 2.
Would love to see some vector games running on it, battlezone would be incredible.
this! :)
I am convinced that you are the most creative man on RUclips.
As others have mentioned, a spinning triangular prism with front-surface mirrors on each face is probably the best way to create your horizontal scan lines. That's what's typically used in aerial lidar scanners, and it's very reliable. You could increase the number of faces to reduce the RPMs but increase the scan rate, but doing so also decreases the angle they sweep, so would require a longer base-line for the same size of CRT screen.
Amazing, really cool project!
Very cool. Looking forward to the black hole generator build video 👍
'Rick' called, he wants his royalties money.
Uhhhhhh love it !
It has to become the head-unit for a chatGPT bot :)
that's a great project! A screen without a glass, amazing!
100% feature complete vi. nice job!
replacing the speakers with the head arm and coil out of a hard drive might be an option? you will get plenty of movement and a good high speed, but there is no feedback and no auto return.
"The only way to quit vim is to turn off and on" that seems accurate
at this rate this dude is comming up with a diy holodeck before its even invented
placing a sponsor right after showing how you used chat GPT is like winking while the sponsor read
Try replacing the Stepper Motors with regular DC Motors. They behave fairly similarly to a speaker coil, except with more displacement.
This was such an awesome project! Took me back to the days I used to fiddle with AVR chips (before Arduino). I absolutely loved this :)
Make it a projector.
An application would be to transfer art or drawings onto paper, wood or other media.
Like when painting on a canvas you can project the lines first
A laser projector being used for back projection would probably be the easiest way of doing it. But, I don't think the point of this is to make an easy one.
Thanks for the knowledge about the uv sensitivity of bambu glow pla
amazing! In case you want to do a second revision, try having the mirrors angled by 45 degrees, so the both contribute equally to the on screen x-axis and y-axis respectively.
This should distribute the work the have to do and maybe improve the speed and quality
Each letter can be drawn with a single line, but turning light on and off is also useful.
I can recommend a dedicated galvo mechanism - they are precise, smooth and fast. I have some that were designed for a fixed barcode mechanism, but the ones from more modern handheld barcode are even better.
Try and display a B+W image, then try driving the laser at different levels to give a few grey levels, then sequence of images to give a TV. You could try multifaced disks to do the scanning rather than stepper motors to do the scanning like a mechanical TV, then sync the laser output to the position of the disks.
I almost lost my lunch, laughing so hard when you had your little benchtop fire. You came close to burning down your neighborhood!
If you use a wheel with several mirrors on it for the x axis you can still use it like that, or you can spin it for "instant" beam return in scope mode.
I'm thinking something like the voice coil from a hard drive and a neodynium magnet/mirror assembly on a pivot would provide much faster response times. A voice coil could both accelerate and brake the mirror. But, what you've managed to achieve with stepper motors is quite amazing.
2:10
ElectroBOOM would approve of this sudden fire. 👌
I like this a lot! Well done!
A similar project would be to make the beam scan lines and making a pixel array, like maybe 80x60 px? Or will the resolution be too low for that? because of the bleed in the screen? Maybe you'd have to make a black grid and make individual pixels with the luminous filament, so the pixels would be compartmentalised? The scanning would require a single stepper motor and gears and a mechanical counting thing (I don't know what to call this) making the vertical progress to the next line at the end of the horizontal scan. Horizontal scanner could be two or more mirrors intermittently turning at the end of the horizontal line, mechanically coupled , vertical scanner could be the same. You know, like those mechanical hand counters or a mechanical odometer in a car.
Computer needs feedback too, to know when to start a line.
Each pixel needs to be lit up exactly, though, so all this needs to be timed properly.
I'm sure the frame rate would be low, but I'd still love to see it! It will of course be limited by the max speed of the mechanical device and how fast the mirrors can spin before self destructing!
Or maybe you could have a spinning prism instead of mirrors? A tiny one, close to the laser?
As you can see, this was a really inspiring vid! Thank you!
speakers could work very well if you find a way to detect its cone position and feed it back into the amp like a negative feedback opamp.
proper galvanometers for laser scanners work exactly like this. they are just rotational speakers with a position encoder and a amp with some filters to set the gain for gain, damping etc.
a beefier amp with lower resistance should already do that trick by shorting more back EMF, but then speakers still aren't great at rotating things in a linear fasion.
Damn two bangers in a row. I think this will be my christmas holiday project!
You want a pair of simple single coil galvanometers to do the deflection (like you find in old analogue multimeters). Just a simple coil with a magnet mounted on a pivot and spring. Can drive them from simple transistor amps on analogue X and Y signals, or directly with PWM. Can have very smooth movement, although you'll have to take momentum into account if you want high precision. Or if you want a CRT style scanning, can use a pair of rotating multiface mirrors, one at slow speed for Y, one faster for X. The speed is critical on these ones, though, to keep signal synchronised.
Very frustrating when youtubers just go at it without doing any research on what other people have done in the past to already solve these problems (and can be found with minimal effort). Reinventing the wheel for "content" is just...
This was pretty cool! Just a thought, could you drive the laser diode on a pwm signal to counteract the slow decay with higher refresh rates? If the laser is responsive enough you could sharpen your pixel width and possibly interlace the pixels for a quicker response to change on the phosphorescent screen since it has a long decay period.
Neat. Now you just need some green UV sensitive filament to complete the aesthetic.
could you find a DLP mirror unit and use that? I assume they're fast as hell and you could probably treat the whole thing as one giant pixel to make calibration easier
You could treat it as one giant pixel, but that unfortunately does not mean it'll behave like one.
Love how you're shifting (back) to historical and educational content-such a refreshing change from the complex PCB stuff.
I'm not quite halfway thru and I haven't read the comments yet, but you could just use a magnifying glass to amplify the travel distance of the laser and then use the little speaker drivers instead of stepper motors
2:13 - ElectroBOOM called and wants his video back!
NEXT You should house it INSIDE A SPHERE!!! (made of that UV/Glow material) And maybe have MULTIPLE (5) LASERS to have coverage on 4 sides and the top
Twisting your wires on the BNC inputs may actually be detrimental, because you increase the length of the wire and the surface area of coupling. That increases your probe impedance and probe capacitance!
Can you add more mirrors to the axes, so that x-movement might be either split into a "wide" movement and a "fine" movement, or to let then both work at half the original range? It might let you do faster speeds if any single mirror doesn't need to wobble as intensely
I don't know why, but when I saw the thumbnail, I thought you were going to do laser beamforming, and I was a bit worried that you'd been in the lab for way, way too long. 😂
I definitely like that you mentioned wearing eye protection.
How about after the device is complete and all closed up? Is it pretty safe to go without the glasses then?
Or is there another color or strength laser that would work but negate the need for protection? I don't think I would want to have such an innocuous looking device around that could harm someone who turns it on without glasses.
Polygon mirrors on aliexpress for about $20 would get you the left to right scanning without turning off the beam, as it would reset when the other mirror comes into rotation. Think of it like a bunch of mirrors on the edges of a stop sign. They look like they are used in some laser printers. Probably if you can find a second hand or "for parts" laser printer you could salvage the polygon mirror. You also don't need to reverse it, just keep it spinning at a constant rate. To calculate the spin rate, you'd need to know the vertical resolution, multiply that by the fps, and divide by the number of sides of the polygon.
You could probably use a lens to move the laser around easier. Have the laser be still, and move the lens up down left right to control the beam
Using the diagonal axes as opposed to X-Y, would give straighter lines, since you would be moving both mirrors at the same time.
I think the speakers could still work because they're so fast. You just have to create some leverage mechanism to create more travel instead of attaching the mirrors directly
That's amazing.
By the way, wouldn't you be able to push to faster frequencies by shedding some extra mass from unused parts of mirrors? Afais the first one may be small circle, and the other a thin rectangle, and smaller moment of inertia may help
Twisting the cables actually does something, it minimizes the electromagnetic radiation but its probably not necessary for your project.
This is great for a cassette futurism aesthetic
3:19 Randy from south park taking a shit. Hahaha
16:04 Made me LOL 🤣
Please continue with using speakers to move the mirrors, I really think that could do a wonderful job!
I was thinking of something like this, but using the read head off of old spinning hard drives for the galvanometer.
nice electroboom move of touching the live electronics whil it blows up lol.
my idea with a spinning mirror prism is still in the air :P
Could possibly replace one of the galvos with a rapidly spinning mirror disc (I think some use hexagonal discs or similarly shaped). If you could properly synch two motors then you could even do two spinning mirror discs (perhaps a solution would be to have one motor and a linked drivetrain?)
Your mirrors can be narrowed. That will reduce the vibrations and improve the bandwidth
How about using hard drive head movements?
If I can get it to run tempest with a rotary dial, I'd build one.
2:14 your inner ElectroBOOM is showing 😂
I was waiting for Rick Astley to make an appearance. Really cool effect. Love it
1:31 Great impression!
Damn vim one triggered my ptsd
You make the exact same sounds that i do when I "exceed the operational voltage" of my components. :D
You know to make it color all you would have to do is get a red green and blue laser please do that it will make me happy 😆 😊
This is great but what i thought was quite brilliant was the idea of using a speaker to 'bend' a mirror!
Would it be possible to get a faster mirror by using some sort of reflective thin foil and drive it with a electrostatic force?
so small subwoofer for V scan and small full range for H scan and an random car audio 2-4 channel full range amp is all you need.
I started off as a programmer and then progressed onto robotics and electrical engineering. On the computer, resources are virtual and infinite. The worst that can happen is you'll hang the OS, but there's nothing a reboot won't fix. And then you begin making electrical circuits that go "poof" just like in that video. And immediately, not only is there an associated cost with having to replace the components, but there are often wait times. You can wait for 2 weeks, before you can start back where you ended. What do you do? You end up re-designing stuff around things that you fry, just to get to the end sooner. Everything is finite and often expensive. This forced me into modular designs, where everything that's unused is able to unplug during testing. The fewer things that can go "poof" at the same time, the better. Sometimes you're just lazy to do the math. You eyeball the parameters, plug things in and watch temperatures through an infrared camera. If nothing's overheating, then you can go and do the paperwork. You raise failure risk, but reduce build time if guesses go smoothly... my advise overall - don't skip out on diodes, if you have inductive loads and anything that can cause reverse polarity... and check operational temperatures. Find out the coldest and the hottest thresholds for your device, to know when it starts to glitch out... blah blah blah... electronics is fun.
How about using it for Slow Scan TV?
Hard drive voice coil might be just the thing. They're VERY fast. Same concept as your speaker idea. Just a coil of wire over a permanent magnet and an amplifier.
Great project and hilarious vídeo. Vim modr crached me up
glass mirrors are too heavy to move them fast enough, you can replace them with thin plastic mirrors to have less inertia (e.g a piece of christmas decoration paper) so it can draw higher frequency content
regular Dc motors will be hard and more fun to control! Give a try!
Why not use a voice coil from something like a hard drive since they allow very fast and precise movements?
This looks so cute!
Excellent project!
BTW did you try using voice coils from an old HDD?
What kind of solder are you using? I am looking for some good solder now that leaded isn't available anymore.
Although overly complicated perhaps making a clock display in numbers and the classic analog format?
lots of magic smoke and his orange friend too. ah, prototyping....
It's a good project if something catches fire :) Also I too tried making a laser scanner using 2 speakers, also did not work well. (That was back in y2k).
Neat! We are getting close to a diy Vectrex.
It would be possible to glue magnets at 4 points on the laser and use coils to attract or repel it, similar to speakers but on two axes
Would be cool to see Vectrex emulation on this thing. There is a thing called "scopetrex" for oscilloscopes not sure if it would work.