Lasers
I have been fascinated by lasers ever since I built a Helium Neon laser back in
the 60's. I was a TV repairman at that time, and one of my customers worked at a
local laser manufacturer. To my delight, he had some YAG laser rods which we
traded for a service call. I made a small YAG laser
which could burn carbon paper. I also built a large nitrogen
laser for a scientist friend. During the Holidays, or on a foggy night at my home is usually the
time I crank up my laser light show, (Christmas
bells). The lasers are an Argon Ion Blue Green, and
a Red Helium Neon. The beam table directs
the beams through two blanking galvanometer driven mirrors to the high speed
X and Y galvanometers that steer the beam to produce animated scenes, that I project onto a rear
projection screen near the road.
I
wanted to bring my light show with me, so I made a handheld laser projector.
A fully functional editor and control panel
allows drawing the image with the joystick,
with adjustable resolution, and saving up to 8 images.
The images play back with adjustable speed and the image size can be zoomed
larger or smaller. The mirrors were pulled from a surplus laser disk player, and
were speeded up by using an IR led and IR photo detector for optical
feedback.
The most complex laser system that I have designed and built is this dual
125Watt CO2 laser welding machine. The two computer controlled lasers make two
hermetic welds to fuse two layers of Hastaloy stainless steel foil that is only
.001" thick together into a flat tube. The same machine helium leak test
the welds, and has a separate station to weld the bottom of the
stainless flat
tube. The system is controlled by a computer running a National Instruments
Labview based program with analog I/O, digital I/O, and data logging
capabilities.
Home
Contact me: genesis1@snet.net
I have been fascinated by lasers ever since I built a Helium Neon laser back in
the 60's. I was a TV repairman at that time, and one of my customers worked at a
local laser manufacturer. To my delight, he had some YAG laser rods which we
traded for a service call. I made a small YAG laser
which could burn carbon paper. I also built a large nitrogen
laser for a scientist friend. During the Holidays, or on a foggy night at my home is usually the
time I crank up my laser light show, (Christmas
bells). The lasers are an Argon Ion Blue Green, and
a Red Helium Neon. The beam table directs
the beams through two blanking galvanometer driven mirrors to the high speed
X and Y galvanometers that steer the beam to produce animated scenes, that I project onto a rear
projection screen near the road.
