lasers

DIY Holograms – In Full Color!

DIY Holograms – In Full Color!

We love the DIY Hologram Kit, but did you know that it could be capable of making full color holograms? With the right lasers and a little more funding, you’ll soon be able to purchase a full color hologram kit!

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Laser Oscilloscope Wraps up Year of Hacks

Laser Oscilloscope Wraps up Year of Hacks

Congrats to MAKE pal Dino Segovis, who just published the 52nd and final project in his one-year Hack a Week series: This cool laser “oscillograph” that modulates an audio input across the beam from a green laser pointer using a linear actuator recovered from a junk hard drive. A spinning mirror provides the time element.

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Laser Ball Is Life of the Party, Makes Regular Tennis Balls Feel Inferior

Laser Ball Is Life of the Party, Makes Regular Tennis Balls Feel Inferior

LeoneLabs on Instructables posted this fantastic how-to on adding 14 lasers to a regular tennis ball to make a Laser Ball. Why? He says that it’s fun to build, it can be done in an afternoon, and “lasers are cool.” The lasers are driven by a Teensy USB Development Board, which is stuffed inside the ball and controlled from outside with an infrared remote control. The Instructable shows you how to make your own in painstaking detail, but you can also follow the build step-by-step in this fun video.

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Scratch Built RGB Laser Projector

Scratch Built RGB Laser Projector

Karol Łuszcz is studying electronics at Poland’s Gdańsk University of Technology. I’d say he’s on-track for an impressive career. This vector-graphics laser projector, his third prototype, includes three laser modules at 650, 532, and 405 nm wavelengths (making it more of an RGV projector, really). Many parts were salvaged, for instance, from a DVD burner, a printer, and a “disco ball.”

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Working Iron Man Style Palm Laser Weapon

Working Iron Man Style Palm Laser Weapon

Yes, OK, I know that the weapons in Iron Man’s palms are technically *repulsor* beams, which, at least as I understand them, are a kind of wholly sci-fictional counterpart to the equally sci-fictional “tractor” beam. But this terrifying device from German laserhacker Patrick Priebe, who previously has produced a handheld Nd-YAG pulse laser that will punch holes in, is “working” in the sense that it is a dangerous, if not deadly, directed energy weapon that you can wear on your palm and use to work great evil…

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Working Handheld Homemade Pulse Laser Weapon

Working Handheld Homemade Pulse Laser Weapon

The claim of penetrating a razor-blade impresses me, although I note the only metal penetration in the video is thin aluminum, which has been painted, possibly so that it will absorb more light energy. There’s also some cool shots capturing the pulsed-laser’s plasma ball in midair.

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Dropless Laser Projection Microscope Takes Glass Slides

Dropless Laser Projection Microscope Takes Glass Slides

Interesting post from dusjagr over on Hacketeria, who reports success using a 100 mW green laser with the lens from a cheap webcam, in the arrangement pictured here, to make a projecting microscope that will accept conventional microscope slides, and is only slightly more complicated than a Planinsic-type water-drop projector. [via Hack a Day]

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