lasers

Young people making handcrafted holiday items at Providence Fab Lab

This holiday season, Kafumba and about 30 other youth are taking a product design class at AS220 Labs, taught by AS220 Labs staff and a designer from Providence-based medical device product development firm Ximedica. The young people have been making and selling handcrafted merchandise in AS220’s Fab Lab – a suite of personal fabrication equipment and software created at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms that includes a laser cutter, milling machine and vinyl cutter.

Continue Reading December 11th, 2009 Brian Jepson

Laser matrix projector for iPhone

Check out this iPhone-controlled 5×7 laser matrix built utilizing 35 laser pointers, a PIC16F722 microcontroller, some miscellaneous parts, and a custom iPhone app.

Continue Reading May 20th, 2009 Adam Flaherty

Laser sundial

Spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool, a nifty laser “sundial,” controlled by an ATtiny24 MCU and a servo: An Atmel ATtiny24 microcontroller drives an R/C servo which in turn rotates a line LASER taken from a LASER level. The microcontroller runs a software real time clock and turns the servo and the line LASER to […]

Continue Reading March 21st, 2009 Gareth Branwyn10

How-To: Create laser art with a digital camera

Our new MAKE magazine columnist, iconic electronics guru Forrest M. Mims III (see “Country Scientist,” MAKE, Volume 17) has a piece up on the Jameco website about using a laser pointer to create cool laser-light patterns to capture with a digital camera: The coherent properties of a laser beam provide an ideal tool for creating […]

Continue Reading March 15th, 2009 Gareth Branwyn4

LaserPup – remote dog annoyance system

Thanks to this post, I’m going to be thinking about that goofy Laser Cats bit on SNL: “In the future there was a nuclear war and because of all the radiation, cats developed the ability to shoot lasers out of their mouths.” But this is LaserPUPS. It’s a servo-controlled laser pointer and Web cam that […]

Continue Reading February 4th, 2009 Gareth Branwyn4

Mario eeepc

Taking devotion to Mario to a whole new level is this eeepc etching by flickr user Revolvingdork. This project taught me 2 things: 1. 70% speed 40% power are good settings for etching with an Epilog on an eeepc. 2. The levels in Mario really weren’t that many screens long! You can pick up an […]

Continue Reading January 22nd, 2009 Luke Iseman

Cool Liquid Changes Color in UV Laser Beam

While researching a new project (as us mad-scientists-types are prone to do), I found this amazing video. It’s basically a clear chemical that undergoes a reaction in the presence of UV light that makes it very quickly turn green. But, the key here is that the reaction is also quickly reversible – in about a […]

Continue Reading January 21st, 2009 John Maushammer14