Hello all,
My name is Erik and I'm an addict. It all started about 10 years ago when I got my first red laser pointer. It wasn't long until I disassembled it to find a tiny potentiometer to screw on. I was very excited to find that I could make it even brighter. At the time however, I was quickly cycling through different hobbies until I found chemistry. This was even more dangerous than lasers because you could make things go PFSSST, BANG or BOOM, so I set aside my little laser pointer.
Fast forwarding to present time I'm now on my 4th year of university studies (chemical engineering) and have rediscovered the joy of lasers. On a leisure trip to china I found some very intriguing (and cheap!) 532 nm DPSS laser pointers at the toy market(!). I bought 2 and brought them home.
Having recently built a lumenlab style video/computer projector I thought maybe you could do something fun or even useful with these lasers as well, so I took a hard drive platter and cracked it for some decent FS mirrors and glued two of them to a speaker. The result was not very spectacular.
Then I realized a potentially better way to get that beam moving; off-axis mounted mirrors on motors. So I bought 2 cheap computer fans and a fan controller to go with them. Chopped off all the wings and glued the mirrors on and... voila! Hypotrochoid patterns! Better yet, the fan controller uses PWM, so I could use that to modulate my laser pointer as well.
Now I am sitting here with a recently purchased LW-45k galvo set realizing that modulating the laser pointer at the required frequencies will not be an easy task and thus I am currently in the process of upgrading to a proper laser.
That is why I'm so happy to have found you!
Now here's my first question:
What's a good laser to start with? My bugdet is fairly limited being a student (this is such a stupid time to start this hobby, but I can't help it), so I was thinking about maximum $500. I plan to go RGB sometime, but maybe I should still buy a TTL model to begin with.
The one I'm looking at now is a laserworld 250 mW TTL laser:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...m=150169683578