Hi all,
Let's start with a very brief introduction: The name's Sven, a physics student from the Netherlands, working on finishing somewhere next year.
Quite some time ago I built a very simple laser-trigger to use in water drop photography (laser, photodiode, arduino) and last week I rigged some old speakers, some mirrors and lots of glue into a rudimentary XY-scanner using the stereo output from my laptop as input signal.
I really liked that, so I'm considering to buy a simple XY-scanner set in order to be able to play more / better with it, without having to worry about speakers making a lot of noise and the whole setup generally breaking apart from vibrations
The set I was looking at can be found here:
"Click me, Click me!"
I'll admit that I'm not too sure about what I should be looking for. This looks pretty neat, and has everything I need - as far as I can tell. (I do have a simple 5mW laser to start with, if I like it enough I'll buy a better one, but not yet)
My main question though is about signal input. For my own rig I just used speakers and audio, but that'll be more complicated in this set. Will I need (an)other component(s) in order to be able to make simple images? Think about lissajous-figures, with multiple waves of different amplitude, frequency and phase (might write the program for that myself) and just some simple animations. (So simple that it's (almost) possible to make them by hand by just writing down X, Y and timestamp or so.)
Any nudge in the right direction would be greatly appreciated! I'd love to buy this set and have some fun, but I don't want to spend ~€100 only to discover I need €500 more of equipment to get the most basic stuff to work. (Yes, I know, lasers can be expensive, but I just want to 'taste' first)
Thanks!