There are some really great photos up now at http://www.nuagevert.org please go check it out!

As if I didn’t already have enough going on this week, I just did this:

Parts were approximately $60, using the PS3 replacement drive assembly and other recommended items from various how-tos on the Internet. Essentially, the diode is removed from the disc assembly, installed in an old 5mw red laser housing, and connected to a brand new LM317 based power supply. I am well on my way to building an adorable little blue laser pointer for far under $100. It is really more purple than blue, but it looks pretty cool. Right now I’m still too afraid to crank up the juice to see how bright it can get.

According to some random forum post:

lasing threshold: 27-28ma
working current/voltage: 4.4v @ 30-40ma
output:
30mA 2.68mW
35mA 9.45mW
40mA 13.3mw
45mA 17.0mW


I can at least verify the lasing threshold was accurate–I do not have the appropriate equipment to measure power output.

And of course, I couldn’t have done it without information from Sam’s Laser FAQ, specifically the article examining Blu-Ray Laser Diodes.

Last fall I was contacted by Heiko Hansen (of HeHe) regarding using the EasyLase USB on the Mac. I must say I was quite intrigued when I found out that he was working on Nuage Vert, a visualization of energy usage in Helsinki. The project uses the cloud of emissions from the Salmisaari power plant as a canvas to demonstrate how much energy is in use by the city.

photo credit HeHe

The project is going on display February 22-29 in Helsinki. I encourage you to go check it out more in depth at www.nuagevert.org.

For the project, I ended up creating a Java wrapper for the libEasyLase driver for OS X. It is now possible to get laser output on the EasyLase USB from inside a Java app on the Mac. Please contact me if you’re interested using this.

I’ve finally put together an installer for the EasyLase USB driver for Mac OS X. I am making the driver available for download today, after more than a year of use internally with the LaserLine project as well as the Laser MacMAME and iTunes visualizer projects.

The build is Universal and has been tested on PPC and x86. The installer includes libftd2xx, a necessary library from FTDI. It is working well with libftd2xx version 0.1.3; Version 0.1.0 is the current released version, and I expect FTDI to update this soon.

Please let me know if you’re using this driver to access an EasyLase USB on the Mac, I am happy to help with usage and development of laser software on Mac OS X.

Download EasyLase USB Driver v1.0 (Universal) for Mac OS X:

libEasyLase.dmg.

After a bit of work over Thanksgiving break, I was able to get the laser projecting Asteroids well enough to play. I apologize for the quality of the photos, but we were really interested in doing it BIG, so the beam was dim and my camera didn’t capture it especially well.

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I was happy to see a number of ACM folk braved the extreme cold weather to play Asteroids on exterior walls at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, an excellent venue which I intend on visiting again next Friday, when my good friend Erik will be playing Cello in the last orchestra concert of the semester.

This whole event turned out to be a quite a success with a Hot Cocoa + Helvetica reception afterwards, despite the fact that the software is still mostly a quick hack. I look forward to further development of additional laserware on the Mac.

Now just to write the real optimization code to make it work well… : )

So, the status of “LaserMAME” has always been kind of up in the air. Links to one associated site, NightLase laserMAME, are currently down. There was that excellent video that circulated the net under the filename lasermameNTSC.mpeg, but I don’t really even know who created that. I’ve played Asteroids in color on a Pangolin system, so I’m not sure if that was a complete clone or what–(ask me about that story sometime in person)–and finally, there has been some discussion on the LaserFreak and Pangolin Forums that seemed as if there was some question about who did the work and who has the rights to LaserMAME. I think a system was even commercialized and available for rental at some point.

Frankly, I’m not really interested in getting in to those politics. But one recent event got me–uhm…motivated–to enter the arena of playing classic vector games on a laser projector. It seems like a most natural thing to do and looks completely awesome. Even the high end graphics people at SIGGRAPH this year loved the ultimate saturation and archaic wireframe visuals generated by a laser projector playing vector games from ‘79 and the 80’s.

When Paul Debevec introduced the Electronic Theater showing we were fortunate enough to have at the NCSA building on November 8th, he excitedly highlighted the laser enabled MAME setup that they had installed when first showing these videos in San Diego. I was excited to hear this and even more pleased when he put up the photo of the renown laserists and others involved with getting the system working; Steve Heminover (who I’ve been lucky enough to meet), Matt Polak, and others.

I have an extreme amount of respect for the people involved here. They’re the world’s experts on laser display, and the production quality was fantastic, but I must admit through the whole video demo, I was thinking, “Hey, it can’t be that hard–everything is already in vector format. What’s the big deal.”

So last night after we got some ice cream at Cold Stone, despa and I got to coding. It took a good 2 or 3 hours to get MacMAME to compile. After that, in another couple of hours we hacked up a prototype of laserMAME using the EasyLaseUSB on Mac OS X. I know we’ve got the math wrong (we didn’t know the range of the x and y coords–and the documentation is temporarily unavailable on the MAME website), but we got Asteroids working with some display bugs.

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I think another couple of nights of hacking could make it really beautiful.

I apologize for the poor quality of the projection, images, and video, but I was so excited we got something working, I wanted to publish right away. I expect we’ll have much better results before, say, March 2008. More to come.

The eve of easter was marked with an intense session of apartment cleaning, however bad an idea this may have been. I even sorted my cache of resistors. There is still plenty to organize, but things are more manageable, especially with regard to the desk on which I build so many of my electronics projects.

Nd:YAG, HeNe, Argon Ion

Freshly unladen of clutter, I felt free to fire up an array of three lasers for the first time in concert. The triad of chromes shone brightly across my apartment’s newly cleaned floor in all their spectral glory. Maybe this summer will afford the opportunity to mix the colors and draw some pretty pictures; what else would one do with such a source of white light?