Other Hardware

There is a good bit of random special purpose hardware items I've either custom built or found at some electronics surplus store that I thought might be usable in some way to support my laser hobby. This page is for those things...

First up is an analog signal generator / controller I built specifically for the cheapie scanners I first obtained to scan laser beams around. It's based on the venerable Intersil ICL8038 'function generator' of which there are two inside this controller. The device can generate several types of waveforms and I have built in capability to switch between them. I had the fancy looking box in my supply of project boxes so decided it was the right size and shape to use for this project. I don't remember where I got this box, but I like it and wish I could find more. Anyway, here are some photos of the finished product and the project as it was being built.

A view of the circuit board, built using point-to-point wiring on the underside. The ICs to the left are the ICL8038's, the ones in the middle are extra signal processing, the transistors to the right are power buffers to drive the scanner voice coils to deflect the laser mirrors. the lower right components are to add blanking to the laser for some added visual interest.

Here are top and rear views of the finished controller. The lettering is dry-transfer from Datak. White was the only color I had at the time. Black would have been much better.

This is the power supply to the left of the controller board. It uses simple linear voltage regulators to obtain the bipolar power for the controller board.

Next up is a manual power controller to supply low voltage power to my solid-state lasers in use during my shows. It had switches as well as pushbuttons for intermittent power to each output (located on the rear panel). The outputs would plug directly into modified laser pointers on the various scanners and effects where they were mounted. LED's indicated which circuits had power on (it was dark so this was helpful).

This is just an audio amplifier, 2 watts I think, that I built to use to drive the voice-coil scanners directly with the music audio. This can work well especialy if I use a sound synthesizer... that can produce some repeatable complex patterns. Even with just music it's pretty interesting.

This is a project I have not yet finished... it will allow me to move the scanned images around a little as well as add in a small amount of audio modulation to whatever is being sent to the galvo drivers. There are two separate channels, for two separate projectors.