I have been into lasers for a few years now, and have purchased several handheld and table top lasers. But, this may be my most entertaining one yet. You may have seen my other laser scanner setup, that is controlled with a computers printer port. While you can design your own shapes and images with it, the stepper motors are not all that fast or accurate. So it was still really only good for scanning patterns, etc. I had been looking at laser projectors that are typically used for DJing and concerts. There are plenty of them on Ebay for fairly reasonable prices. Most are not controlled by a computer though, until you spend over $1800. The one I purchased it controlled with a DMX controller, which is a standard for most DJ and Concert lighting and effects. I will explain that more later on, as I am not all that familiar with it yet.
One nice thing about this unit is that it is all enclosed in a nice aluminum housing, complete with a mounting bracket and rubber feet. You dont need anything else to get it up and running, just plug in the power cable and sit back and enjoy the show.
The unit has 3 modes of operation. Auto, Sound, and DMX Control.
Auto mode is just what you think it would be. Simply plug in the unit, and it will cycle through its pre-programmed patterns. If I understand the manual correctly, there are 52 set patterns, and 52 patterns that can be adjusted via the DMX control. In auto mode, I assume it cycles through the 52 set patterns.
In Sound Mode, the unit will listen to the beat of the music you are playing, with its built in microphone, located on the front of the unit. There is a blue indicator light next to the microphone, that will flash when it hears a beat. There is also a sensitivity knob on the back of the unit to adjust how load something has to be for it to react to it. I found this actually worked fairly well. I didnt have to have the music up super loud for it to hear it. While it may not respond to the music like a full blown concert lighting setup, that is actually programmed to a certain song, it does better than most other systems that use sound.
These modes are selected with the DIP switch on the back of the unit. The DIP switch also sets the ID number of the unit. This is used when you have more than one unit connected to a DMX controller. Each unit would need its own individual unique ID number. You can see the two DMX ports on the back also. One for the input from the controller. The other is an output, that can be used to daisy chain multiple units together.
Lets take a look inside the unit. Inside you will find a power transformer, power control board, galvo scanner control board, a red 80mW and a green 40mW laser diode, combining mirror, and the galvo, or stepper motors.
The controller board can make each laser turn on and off at certain times. It can also make both turn on at once, which will mix to give you the yellow color. It adds alot more effect than just using green like my other scanner setup. The contrast is really neat, and is much more pronounced in person. The photos and video do not capture the color well.
The red 80mW diode could be a bit more powerful, so that it was closer to the greens 40mW output. You eye sees green colors much better than any other color, so it takes much more red output to "look" the same brightness to your eyes. Typically, you need 3 times the red output to match the green. I may upgrade the red diode at some point, but it doesn't do all that bad as is. I still need to make sure everything is perfectly aligned, to ensure the two diodes mix well to form the yellow beam.
I had the unit running about an hour with no problems. The housing was still cold to the touch, thanks to the fan in the back keeping things cool. I plan to run it a while with the housing off, so that I can feel the actual laser diode to see if its getting very warm.
Here is a video I made of the unit set to auto mode. As I said, the video really doesnt do it justice. The yellow shows up as white in the video, and the beam seems to flicker more. I think this is due to the videos frame rate, etc.
http://www.jtice.com/home_movs/laser/cl-16rgy/CL-16RGY.wmv
Here is an animated GIF I made from some photos I took of the laser.
I will have more information on the Laser, and the DMX control, after I eventually purchase the controller, one step at a time I guess.
