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Comment by andoando | Hacker News Reader

Sorry I should have clarified. I am thinking of lasers for light shows. Doesn't have to be industrial level, small low powered ones would be fine.

I am lot more interested in the software side of this, so Im hoping I don't have to rig together a bunch of individual lasers together.

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You may be thinking of beam directors, rather than the lasers themselves, aside from turning them on and off as desired. Solid state lasers are good, if they have the power you need (and yes, understand and practice laser safety)

The rest would be beam steering. Geometric optics and servos. I remember reading some on scanner optics, which would help you. Just think angles instead of UPC codes.

Programming the servo's would please you, but you first need the beam steering gear, and also the on/off, and interfaces for both aspects.

I don't know of any OTC/KISS stuff.

I am thinking of stuff this

https://www.lighting-geek.com/product/cartoon-animation-lase...

https://www.ktvlights.com/products/8-eyes-red-laser-light-dm...

https://www.wayfair.com/YXSUN--9-Eyes-RGB-Moving-Spider-Beam...

I can't find any specifications at all. I was hoping for an interface like "move laser 1, +50 x", "turn laser 2 off". They come with DMX interface, but all the commands that I see are just setting preprogrammed effects.

There is sophisticated software for projecting any animation, so I assume there is some software like this somehwere.

If you want animation, then DMX-512 is inadequate. You are looking at frame-buffer to beam director(s) conversion. That would be specific to the hardware you have. The systems that I have come across are proprietary and designed to be rented-out out to event organizers.

From the software point of view, perhaps laser projection TV technology might be better suited to what you want to achieve.

> From the software point of view, perhaps laser projection TV technology might be better suited to what you want to achieve.

Laser projection TV is boring. I've got one, and it's more or less the same as any other tv. Hook up an HDMI and go. It doesn't give you a laser light show, even if it is technically laser, light, and a show. Technically they're pretty boring too, they're lcd or dlp projector with a laser instead of an incandescent light source.

The OP clearly wants an x-y servo mirror / galvonometer setup plus some way to modulate the laser. Some people experiment with scanning mirrors in one dimension, but then you end up with a rasterized display and not the smooth curves or a true laser show.

I actually did this at one point in time. The hardware you're looking for is a "laser galvo" setup. It typically takes a +/-12v range analog signal as input. I ended up building my own hardware to drive this. You can use a D to A converter and an op-amp to take a digital output from a raspberry pi or arduino and get the correct signal level. I ran mine on an arduino and it was plenty fast for simple things. Complex animations that require more compute on the device might be a bit much. Enabling and disabling the laser is as simple as a transistor.

No one actually uses lasers for light shows any more. Far too dangerous. They're just LEDs and some theatre fog.

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