Thank you so much for the kind words. I am the creator and love these kinds of projects. Check out another project I created along the same lines: TheArtBot.com
If you are asking why not many people do these types of projects- you sounds like an excellent candidate to do one yourself! I have list of project ideas on my phone that I will add to at random times. Next time you think of a cool idea write it down and make it a reality!
Great explanation of the math, made it very easy to follow. And the joke at the end was a nice touch, I was totally waiting to hear about his SAAS startup...
Well if you want the laser to produce better images then one needs to use the dark art of cam design. As it turns out, simply determining cam geometry necessary to go through all those points is not enough, one must also take into account the velocity, acceleration, and even jerk profiles(the derivative of acceleration). If one does not take these into account the follower being driven can't spring back fast enough and the follower does not follow the intended profile. Most automobile cams must be produced to very high tolerances in order to achieve low vibration. The fact that CNC machine tools move in discretized distances can cause problems in some cases.
Yes- just like you are saying, the intention with the Mechancial Laser Show was not to maintain a constant laser speed, but accelerate and decelerate the laser gently. You can see the mechanism by which that is done by pausing the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dtBUiaAqRE
Since the time taken to travel to each next point is constant, closer points together mean slower speed and spread out points mean high speed. You can see that the laser will slow down for taking the corners and speed up for the straights. There was no math behind this- I just eyeballed it but you could write software/math to help you determine the perfect spacing/acceleration.
Hi. This is Evan, the creator of Mechanical Laser Show. I am planning to present it at the upcoming Maker Faire in SF for a day so feel free to come by and check it out.
If you google "non-mechanical laser beam steering" you can find some interesting work being researched (I don't think anything is commercially available, though).
> An alternative to an acoustic-optic modulator is the electroptic deflector. There are a few types but the readily available type uses a quadrupole electric field on a lithium niobate crystal. This generates a linear refractive index gradient in one plane that can be adjusted on a ultra fast time scale. This gives the ability to change the deflection angle of a suitably polarised beam propagating down the quadrupole axis. With fast pulse generators the deflection speed can be good enough to achieve deflection by several diffraction angles in perhaps 10 ps.
This sounds like something Geordi LaForge would say.
You can do it nonmechanically by bending the spacetime geodesic of the light path with an electromagnetically controlled nano black hole. Pretty sure they're not yet available on Aliexpress, but probably soon.
Like why don’t we see more instances of cool, low cost, big value hackery? Is it just too creatively difficult to summon these types of ideas idk