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The Plan

A project log for Laser Galvo Clock

Clock projected onto the wall with cheap laser galvos

alan-greenAlan Green 06/08/2019 at 02:202 Comments
 A picture of my kitchen, showing where I plan for the clock to go
Kitchen, with VR Overlay

I want to replace our kitchen clock with one that glows in the dark. I was inspired by this instructable from DeltaFlo and encouraged by further write ups such as this one from Barton Dring and  this one from Vulcaman.

Napkin Diagram

Hand drawn block diagram of Laser Galvo Design
Current Thinking
For someone of my skill level, this will be a complicated build:

Questions To Answer

I will begin by addressing uncertainties:

  1.  How good are the galvos and their drivers? What kind of accuracy can I expect in drawing?
  2. Do I need really to produce a ±5v signal, or is 0-10v good enough?
  3. What laser should I use? I want one that can operate continuously (for years, I hope!) show brightly and still be eye-safe.
  4. Where did I put that Raspberry Pi and its power supply?

Discussions

Ken Yap wrote 06/08/2019 at 02:46 point

ESP32 can be developed using the familiar Arduino IDE due to excellent support by Expressif (all the familiar libraries are available, and then some) despite the huge difference in architecture and there are WROOM boards in Uno form factor so I wouldn't rule it out so early. You might be able to merge the Pi's functions into the MCU. See Peter Dalmaris's guide: https://techexplorations.com/guides/esp32/begin/module/

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Alan Green wrote 06/14/2019 at 21:22 point

Hi Ken: yes, I did a fair bit of thinking about ESP32 vs Raspberry Pi vs BeagleBone. I should write this up. Thank you for the pointer to the ESP32 guide.

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