clickamouse
The Illuminatus Story Part One: The Interociter
Greetings, all;
I have been lurking here for a couple-three years now, and have learned an enormous amount of laser lore. You guys and gals have been instrumental in getting me to where I am today, so it is payback time; I am dropping my cloaking device and going public with some of what I have learned over the years. In the times to come I will post pix and descriptions of some of our 13+ projectors. Having a nanoscopic budget, we focus mostly on lumia, diffraction, and motiondizing effects, all done old-school, the way we learned it from Edmund Scientific et al back in the dusty gas-lit laser days of yore.
Chief Engineer Wayne Gillis and I are founding members of Illuminatus, a light show that has been around since the early 70’s, albeit with a big honking hiatus during most of the 80’s – 2000’s. We got back into it in 2009 and have been lasing madly away ever since.
In real life, I’m a recently-retired Macintosh computer specialist, who spent the last 20 years working for the University of Michigan. I’m now a commercial photographer, web master, writer, Mac consultant, and now, laserist. Wayne is an engineer working for a big-time laser company.
This intro chapter is about a lissajous/spirograph projector we built back in the early 70’s, the Interociter. Yup, named after the device in “This Island Earth”, to which it bears very little resemblance. The exact date of the creation of this is lost in the mists of time, but the first time it was used in a major show was when we did the opening ceremonies for the 1976 World Science Fiction Convention in Kansas City, where Robert Heinlein was guest of honor.
This plywood box has survived the decades and still works in our show some 38 years later. It has had around 8 different lasers in it, starting with a 1mw HeNe, and currently hosts a ~250mw red solid state jobbie I bought from somebody in Canada 3 years ago. I don’t recall the exact specs.
Here is the top, with a logo I made from cut-up astronomy posters and red tape. The box is made from ¼” plywood, reinforced on the inside, with brass corner protectors and a key lock.
The business end, with recent labeling. Note the holes on either side: we would bolt on lumia, diffractors, and rubber-clad speaker adapters onto the front to augment the spirograph effects we produce.
The side with the laser warning light, and stencil of our (way-obsolete) address and phone numbers.
This is the control panel that Wayne built. Wayne did most of the electronics and design work, and I did all the wood work. Wayne was working at an electronics company at the time, and could get great deals on light-up switches, etc. There are 4 mirror motors involved, and a chopper motor. The motors can be speed-controlled, and their directions switched. The chopper is a notched cardboard wheel that, well, chops. The mirrors were from Edmund Scientific (the super-thin ones), epoxied directly onto the motor shafts.
Here is the inside of the controller, and yes, those are not pots, those are metal-wound rheostats. Back in the day we were pretty clueless about electronic speed control, and these served to control the large currents needed to spin the motors.
The innards. The motors were bought from some surplus catalog – no Internet back then and finding parts was always a major pain. IIRC, these were ventilation fans, surplus from Navy submarines. Wayne rewired them, separating the stators from the rotors somehow, and by rheostatically controlling the voltages involved, we achieved speed and direction control. Note the big honking transformer and caps involved. This sucker weighs in around 40lbs. Here you see the beam hitting the mirrors, somehow making its way through the tangle of cabling involved.
Another shot of the big honking power supply, filter caps, mil-spec connector (which bolts to the heatsinks), and PS, driver and laser. The box is covered with black tolex, which is seen peeling at the bottom of the photo.
The device is supported by an old Atlas speaker stand used originally to support the Shure Vocal Disaster speaker columns we used as PA in the Martian Entropy Band (long story). And yes, we can get this sucker 3M above the crowd. I built a cradle out of scrap lumber and this allows us to tilt and pan the beam before locking it down. In the background you see a Molecular Disrupter - more on this in a subsequent article.
Here are some shots from a recent show. The spiro is seen above the crowd left. In the middle, our logo is projected, and some motion-twitched lasers are on the right.
Here is a close up of some more spirocity, overlaid with the output from a 473nm Molecular Disrupter.
This is Wayne running the show with the controller on his lap, just like he used to do back in the 70’s. In the background you see some of our other devices including a laser lunchbox, and a couple of Bantam Blasters. I will be covering these in my next articles.
We took our show to the 2010 Maker Faire Detroit, and here is a shot of some future laserists having their way with the controls. Ya gotta start ‘em young…
Finally a couple of shots of patterns from Wayne’s basement. These look a lot more impressive on a far wall in a darkened hall.
And finally, a video Wayne shot of the device in action; note the sound of the motors in the background - gives it a nice 50's science fiction vibe:
A big thank you to PL stalwarts cdbeam, kiyoukan, mecheng3, hakzaw1, dave, gottaluvlasers, omar, stanwax, drlava, bridge, and all the others who have been so helpful to me over the years.
And especially thanks to our admin/janitor, for making all of this possible, and who allowed me to change my boring membership name to the one below. I’m looking forward to adding more lore in the months to come (sorry it took so long for me to start contributing).
Hope this is useful/amusing to y’all.
More to come.
Lux Plus Esto… Mike
(clickamouse, formerly mgould)
In Charge, Illuminatus Lightshow
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Originally Posted by platinum
