Cool Laser Tricks!

This is a compilation of my favourite laser tricks, that I like to show to my friends when they come to my place.
I hope you will like it and get some new ideas... pls vote 5 stars :)

Step 1: Before We Start...

ALWAYS WEAR EYE PROTECTION!!!!

Step 2: Mirrors

I guess I don't need to describe what to do with these... just use your imagination and make the best laser trap ever! :D
I found nice 1cm mirrors (not-first surface) with some adhesive thing on their back side (useful for the laser traps :D)

no, I'm just kidding, mirrors can make some cool effects!

Step 3: Motors

Motors are most commonly for making spirographs. The simplest one is using 2 motors, but there are also 3 and 4 motor spirographs that make WAY cooler effects.
This is my ghetto 2 (the 3rd motor broke off) spiro, built on some scrap wood piece using lot of hot glue.

Step 4: Diffraction Grating

You probably know this one...

Step 5: Crystal Balls

These will cause a lot of diffractions when a laser is shined through them.

Step 6: Slow-rotating Motors

But who wants to spin the shiny things form previous step manually... Let's use some slow motors to do this!


Another cool effect is to slightly melt a CD or DVD and attach it to slow motor. Makes best effect with a white (combined from red, green and blue lasers) or multiline Argon laser.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP-OoKwWm88

Step 7: Optics From Sleds

Always when I got some old CD or DVD drive, I completely rip all the optics from it (even if the diode is useless). Sometimes I get some pretty interesting optics
Here I'm showing the diffraction gratings from various sleds (I can recommend the PHR-803T sled, there are 2 of them)

Step 8: Lumia Wheel

Well, in my case its more like "LUMIA DOOR"... but you get  the point LOL
This effect is made using some kind of textured glass which is cut into a circle and slowly rotated in front of the laser.

Step 9: LCD Takedown!

If you disassemble the color LCD module from old cellphone, you'll get few interesting things: 2 (or more) fresnel lenses (which are great as line generator optics), some kind of plastic light diffuser and 2 polarization filters (these are hard to get, you must rip these off from the glass part of LCD). I'm showing these in the following video: