TechLasers keeps on giving
First of all, I’d like to thank TechLasers.com again for sending me the laser to review. When I agreed to review, it, I didn’t anticipate having so much fun with it and finding more uses than I wrote about previously. I also never anticipated what came next. If you click the image at right, you’ll get a larger version, where you’ll notice that JoeTech.com and a quote from my review are proudly displayed on the TechLasers home page. I was very excited to see that. Thanks again, TechLasers!

She has Lissajous cruves
Just after my last post, one of my employees told me that he had a Lissajous curve maker at home. I have to admit that I didn’t know the term, but I told him to bring it in and we’d take a few minutes and play with it. You can click the link to find out some detail about Lissajous curves, but I’ve also created a short video for you. We went into the “war room” in the back, set it all up, and shut off the lights. What resulted was the light show below (RSS readers should click through to the site to see it).

How it’s done
To the left is an image of what Andrew brought in. You can click the image to see a larger version, as always. The concept is really fairly simple. You have two small motors with speed controls. Attached to each motor is a small mirror, angled at its base. The motors are mounted at near-45 degree angles, and the laser is mounted on the clothes pin. The black panel is just to block any stray laser beams. To make this thing produce Lissajous curves, you just need to turn it and the laser on, and then adjust the speeds of the motors. The faster the motors are spinning, the more interactive and wild the designs become. I want to build one of these, myself, but I want to have the motor speeds controlled by a digital source. I think it would be pretty cool to control it remotely via the web. I will definitely post whatever I come up with.