Welcome to the website of the well’s first compact and fully portable, laser video projector in the world. This project has probably begun with my first visit to the IFA in the mid 90s. There I saw for the first time a laser video projection: Schneider (later Laser Display Technologies ) presented its vision for the future of television: Crystal clear pictures and extremely high contrast and excellent color reproduction. Unfortunately, these devices were prohibitive. I therefore decided a few years later to build your own laser video projector. In 2001 I took with this project in the contest youth research part and put the finished projector in the same year (only a few years after my first visit) at the IFA , the largest consumer electronics trade show in the world.
Why spend time in a crowded and cold times square when you can make your OWN Times Square LED ball? Perfect for new years eve, disco parties, weddings, raves, bar mitzvahs, or just a romantic night in. This DIY LED Disco Ball is made using Adafruit’s 12mm LED pixels, an Arduino and two 2.4GHz XBee’s (for wireless disco control!). The LED pattern is controlled by the open source graphics language, Processing so it works on Windows, Mac or Linux computers. The ball pattern is made of a dozen laser cut acrylic panels that are ziptied together and the hanging cord is also the power supply cable (HD video here).
We’ll have a full tutorial after the new year so stay tuned and get your leisure suit to the cleaners!
It’s a “programmable disco ball,” a “cat toy for humans,” and a “personal laser light show,” all rolled into one. That’s how one Matt Leone describes his latest creation, aptly known as the Laser Ball. To realize his dream, Leone drilled a set of holes into a garden variety tennis ball, and inserted about 14 laser diodes, each with an attached strip of diffraction grating. Said diodes were then synced up with an Arduino-equipped Teensy microcontroller nestled within the ball, alongside a rechargeable battery – http://leonelabs.blogspot.com/
NEW PRODUCT – Geiger Counter Kit Case. Protect your Geiger counter kit and keep accidental fingers from touching the high voltages with this handsome acrylic laser-cut case. Once you’ve assembled and tested the Geiger kit, you can easily install these two cover plates on using the included screws and standoffs.
This is just for the case parts, batteries and Geiger counter kit are not included!
Geiger Counter Kit – Radiation Sensor. Detect particles and/or make a cool random number generator with this handsome Geiger counter kit. This easy-to-make pack of parts turns a simple Geiger-Muller tube (included) into a portable blink, beeping radiation detector. You can also connect an FTDI friend to the header, to get serial output for datalogging on your computer.
We put this kit together in a couple of hours and hand lots of fun bringing it around and listening for ticking sounds near our smoke detectors, bananas, countertops, Brazil nuts, chunks of Uranium, etc. It includes all components (PCB, tube, & parts) but you will need basic soldering tools and two AAA batteries to complete it.
I was reading Make:’s Blog and I saw the entry on laser cutting wood to make it bendable (seeSNIJLAB). See here. I set out to see if it was possible to laser cut plexiglass in the same way. To my surprise it works pretty good! You can see for yourself the results.
I also created a 20″x3″ version in 1/8 red plexiglass. This took about 45minutes of cutting. You can see a video of how flexible it is.
Every builder/maker/hacker has a deep dark desire to harness a freakin’ laser in their craft. You know it, we know it, and Full Spectrum Lasers knows it. Now’s your chance to win this 40 watt deluxe laser cutter!
The Theme: Light
Your project must focus on light in some way. Maybe you’re building an interesting solar oven, or possibly transmitting data using lasers. You could build a light show out of old projector parts, or make solar fiber-optic lighting for your home. Who knows, surprise us! The project somehow just has to deal with Light.
How will the winners be determined?
After the contest entries are all in, we will put up a vote for 1 week. Your votes help us decide, but ultimately we will choose based on who impressed us the most with their presentation and documentation.
When and How Do I need to submit my project?
All entries must be in by January1 . The most important part of the submission is being documented well. We don’t care if you host it on your page, on Make projects, or send it to us in a pdf. As long as it is easy to follow and full of pictures/videos. We would LOVE to have updates as you go. Let us know what you’re doing!
You must be at least 18 years old to be eligible. All shipping costs will be covered inside the continental US. If you’re outside the US, you can enter, but you will be responsible for shipping of the laser if you win (roughly.$300-$500).
When will you announce the winners?
Winners will be announced Friday, the 13th of January.
Bonus prizes?
yep, we’re giving away two bonus prizes! We are going to get a couple extra EL wire starter packs and send them to some lucky people. We will select one random twitter follower, and one random commenter from any post on our website for these additional prizes. These will be announced on January 1st.
Back for a fourth installment is the wildly-popular Epilog Challenge, sponsored by Epilog Laser and Instructables. The contest opens Aug. 18 and closes Nov. 14, 2011. The grand prize winner receives a Zing 16 Laser engraving/cutting system. Entrants will display their creativity and inventiveness by posting amazing, inspiring projects, and will also explain what they’d do with an Epilog Laser system should they win the challenge.
“When it comes to the DIY community, a laser engraving and cutting system is immensely valuable in helping create prototypes, one-of-a-kind inventions and so much more,” said Mike Dean, vice president of sales and marketing for Epilog Laser. “We’ve seen such an array of wonderful, useful, creative projects from the past three challenges and we’re excited to partner with Instructables once again as we anxiously await all the unique instructables that people dream up.”
“I absolutely love giving away fantastic tools like laser cutters,” said Eric Wilhelm, founder of Instructables.com and director of communities at Autodesk. “Previous winners of the Epilog Challenge say that it’s changed their life, and I can’t wait to see what this year’s entries bring.”
Previous Epilog Challenge winners include the DIY High-Speed Book Scanner, the 8x8x8 Animated LED Cube, and most recently the Arduino Powered Chess Playing Robot.
Instructables is the most popular project-sharing community on the Internet that provides easy publishing tools to enable passionate, creative people to share their most innovative projects, recipes, skills and ideas. For more information on Epilog Laser, visit epiloglaser.com. To learn more about Instructables and the Epilog Challenge, visit instructables.com/contest/epilog4/.
Good luck, we hope an Adafruit friend/fan/customer wins!
Lately I’ve been learning about laser-cutting my own project boxes for the electronic gear I build. The process took me a little while to get my head around, but now that I know what I’m doing, I’m hooked. The finished product looks great and works great. For about the same price as I would pay for a generic plastic box from an electronics retailer, I can get my own enclosure made with every hole cut out perfectly and all the labelling included.
One of NYCR’s most popular weekly classes is in using our Epilog mini-35 laser cutter. The only supported system is Windows with CorelDRAW and Epilog’s closed source driver, which doesn’t seem right for a hackerspace. Luckily, AS220 Labs has figured out how to talk to the Epilog using PJL. I’ve written a command line tool, epilog, that will translate the Postscript file into commands for the cutter. There are a few differences from Epilog’s driver — the most significant is that with the epilog command line tool the home position is always the upper right of the page, not the center of the bounding box as in the Windows printer driver version. The other major difference is that the lines to be cut are distinguished by color, not width: anything that is #FF0000 will be translated into a vector cut.
To use it from inkscape you will need to write out a Postcript file by selecting “Print to file” and writing the output.ps file. Then you can run it through the tool like this…
The question of laser kerf comes up occasionally in Adafruit’s weekly Ask-an-Engineer chat, so I figured this would be of interest to some folks. James Williamson shares his method for finding the kerf of a laser cutter in different materials and material thicknesses. He writes:
Kerf is determined by material properties and thickness, the focal length of the lens and the gas used while cutting. Our laser cutter uses a lens with a 50mm focal length and uses compressed air to push out the vapourised/molten swarf.
By cutting a rectangle of material and then cutting 9 rectangles within it you get 10 cuts. When these 9 rectangles are pushed together at one end of the “frame”, the resulting gap at the other end is the sum of the kerfs. Dividing this gap by ten gives the average kerf for that material and material thickness.
He uses a feeler gauge to measure the width of the gap and then divides by the number of cuts (10, in this case) to get the kerf for that particular material/thickness/feedrate/power combination on his cutter.
Josh Judkins of Ponoko added this in the comments:
We’ve found that kerf widths can vary even on the same material sheet, depending on whether you’re cutting a straight or curved line, or the laser head is moving on the x or y axis.
Good info to keep in mind.
You can check out James’ blog post about it here. Nice work, James!
What if we could bring the magic of ANIMATED GIFs into the physical world? Well, now, using modern LASER TECHNOLOGY, we can. We specialize in transforming the finest in designer-crafted animated GIFs into physical zoetropes, bringing the animated glory of the old-timey web onto your actual desktop or COFFEE TABLE.
Michael Hansmeyer uses algorithms invented by Pixar and painstaking handicraft to generate columns with dizzying detail. When people mistake photographs of your physical prototypes for computer renderings, you know you’ve achieved something amazing. That’s exactly what happened when Michael Hansmeyer showed off his “computational architecture” column, created by iterating a subdivision algorithm over and over again and then fabricating it out of cardboard.
Hershey Text is an Inkscape extension that can render a line of text in one of several stroke-based “engraving” fonts. This extension solves a persistent problem, and one which we have come across in many different contexts: How to easily create simple and readable vector representations of text.
Printable catalog (PDF)
) laser projector v2.5 – graphics and animations
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