my DIY scanner progress

[Youtakun]

I'm making some progress with my DIY scanner. I had some 2.5" hard disks lying around and I thought I could use the linear head motors as deflection axes, kind of like galvos.

After a lot of preparing, thinking and puzzling, today I was finally able to fix some dichro mirrors to them and combine two motors for 2D graphics. I'm using an audio amplifier from 90W PC boxes (the amplifier is actually 15W) with the bass/treble circuits bypassed.

The harddisks (or what's left of them).




I removed all extending head lips except for one (to minimize inertia). I bent the remaining one by 270° to attach mirrors to them (with wax). The mirror holders can turn around a with a light force to align them.


A sine wave generator set to 50Hz (right) and a square wave generator set to ~10Hz (left).



The result:



It is highly non-linear, highly keystoned and highly skewed, but with some custom correction algorithms, filters and custom designs (inverse adjusting the pixels) it should be possible to generate something useful with this.

[allthatwhichis]

Very interesting project! . What lasers are you using to test with?

[Youtakun]

I'm using dichroic mirrors for red and violet. The laser i uaed for the tesst is my 140mw pocket you see in the first photo. When that laser lies on the table thw alignment is exactly perfect

[steve-o]

Nice! DIY projects are always more fun.