Simple Laser Show

Fist, the disclaimer: I am not liable for any damage you cause to your eyes or any other part of your body, someone else, or anything by reading this Instructable. Lasers are dangerous, and they will permanently damage your eyes if used incorrectly. do not get any laser above 30mw, unless you are experienced and familiar with the risks of a stronger laser. do not point the laser at anyone or yourself.

Anyways, this is a simple laser show i thought of when I was trying to diffuse an led and i heated a piece of acrylic until bubbles formed. When i got bored of testing led diffusion methods, i shined a laser through it and noticed a nice, 3-D pattern. I decided to utilize this and make a laser show out of it. About 30 minutes later, i had a nice looking laser show. I tried to make this Instructable as easy as i could, please comment.

Step 1 Materials

You will need the following: 
- A laser pointer or module, see This. don't get anything above 30mw!

- A bunch of legos, make sure you have a motor, a battery box or power source and a worm gear box. (any small, slow speed motor will give you good effects).

- a small piece of acrylic at least 1/8th of an inc thick (available at home depot or Lowes, or pretty much any hardware store). be sure not to get polycarbonate, it turns black or tints when heated, which is not what we want.

Tools:

the tools you will need are:
 - a drill + drill bit
 - Saw to cut the acrylic
 - a heat source
 - something that i probably forgot to mention


Once you have all of these things, you can move on to the next step.

Comments

[lrkm13]

Yeah, my friends and i are trying a multiple laser design

[AzurusNova]

Not a bad little instructable, and a very neat way in using lego's.

I was thinking if there was a way to do something like this only have it in a case with interchangeable effects, would be quite cool to see.

[biolethal]

it is possible, it would just need to be a little more complicated and use more electronics, because you would have to either use multiple lasers or mirrors to deflect the beam into the different effects. try diffraction grating for many beams and round acrylic/glass rods for a line effect. also, the classic spirograph could be used. if you are really into electronics you could use galvos or something like that, which can be driven by computer software.

[AzurusNova]

Neat. I was thinking of tying in a few lasers of different colors into an arduino along with the motors to control each one of them. Would be really neat and could easly be modded or upgraded.

[biolethal]

Try it, upload a video if you do!

[AzurusNova]

When I get around to it, I sure will.