So a year or two ago, Johnathon (aka DRM916) was showing off his new beam bars from GoldenstarLasers and said "you can never have enough red". Well, challenge accepted, Sir!
Seriously, I wanted to add some beam bar / beam table type effects to my environment. As I recently finished making several Stupid Laser Routers utilizing simple DMX relay boards, I thought I'd take some more of the boards and mate them with these cheap single mode pointer modules that China sells. Yeah, yeah, this is a TTL approach and not lightning-fast switching by any means, but I'm talking about $11 250mw 650nm lasers combined with a $44 DMX Relay Controller, some mounts and miscellaneous other stuff to make a 12 beam, 3W total single-mode beam bar for under US$250 including shipping. I figured it was worth a go.
So here's what I came up with:
Is it pretty? Not really, but at least its shoved in the back of my environment concealed by a bar.
The controller box is very "clicky" with its loud relays, so I made a long cable between the beam bar and the controller unit and jammed the controller unit in a cabinet where a bunch of LED controllers live:
The output is what you would expect from 250mw of 650nm red single mode diodes. You can adjust the colimation lens to defocus them if you'd like, but I have them focused fairly tightly at the moment:
The end result isn't terrible in my opinion. Its cheap, you can change the direction of the beams like a beam table and its relatively compact compared to a beam bar. Down sides include the noisy clicks, lack of analog control, relative ease to screw up your alignment, and aesthetic . . short-comings. I was encouraged enough by this cheap approach to single beams to buy another dozen lasers (half of which are 'fat beam' modules and mount them around the room.
These guys are controlled by 3 channel controllers which I hid wherever I could find a spot:
So far, so good, I think. Here's a show I reworked to show them in action:
YouTube:
Or on Vimeo if you can't access YouTube:
Next up, adding some green!
-David