I need some idea's ...

[Things]

Hey guys, next term for science I am going to be doing an extended investigation. This means I can choose my own experiments etc that I want to do. Of course, being a laser and electronics nerd, I was thinking of doing something more pratical. I don't have much of a budget, though we are seeing if the school pays for the resources we happen to buy, which would be better on my part but I can't be sure

Anyone got any high school based laser experiments or something I could try and do a writeup on?

Cheers,
Dan

[shrad]

a TEA laser would be nice for that purpose, but you have to be aware that you might get stuck with an useless group of aluminium plates at term ^^

but it is always nice to show people high voltage stuff, big sparks, and finally a fluorescent pen ripped in a cuvette which is lasing blue or red

you might also make some kind of basic scanning michelson interferometer to demonstrate moving interference patterns on a screen and the wave behaviour of light

[Things]

I have been thinking about building a TEA pumped dye laser, though I think that's getting a bit over the top. I am now considering building a portable video projector. Can be easy, and would be pretty damn cool!

Athough, I am having problems finding a cheap supplier of SMALL colour LCD screens.

[shrad]

try to look at some atmel µC forums where you might find some usb to ipod LCD or the like

also PC modding forums usually use LCDs to display motherboard data on the case

you might win by finding some mobile phone LCD to USB interfaces

[Mr.Coffee]

DNA Sequencing.

[Laserman532]

Explosives are always a treat

[daedal]

Have you looked at 'transferring sound by laser'?

I saw a project a couple years back where a laser was used to send sound data across 5 miles using a laser... CD player sends signal to the laser, the laser sends it out, and it's captured and replayed into speakers 5 miles out.

Should be pretty easy... I'd give it a shot on a smaller scale

--DDL

[daedal]

Have you looked at 'transferring sound by laser'?

I saw a project a couple years back where a laser was used to send sound data across 5 miles using a laser... CD player sends signal to the laser, the laser sends it out, and it's captured and replayed into speakers 5 miles out.

Should be pretty easy... I'd give it a shot on a smaller scale

--DDL

Oh, by the way... it's nothing new since every fiber-optic line does pretty much the same thing... just digitally as opposed to using analog modulation

--DDL

[Things]

Explosives are always a treat

Not sure how well that would go down with the teachers

"OK, now we need to go stand behind that building!"

Also, I have one tried the sound-over laser, pretty cool.

[shrad]

the laser spy microphone might also be a good idea, and simply reflecting a laser from a window to a photodiode, you would hear some low quality audio from the room behind the window

higher quality sound can be obtained with an interferometer between the original beam and the reflected beam, but it is tricky to align