LASERS! && Freemont Street LED array (was Re: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now))

[Pete Turnbull]

On 19/07/2016 21:46, Mouse wrote:
>>> You'd probably know, then - what's the fastest way to deflect a
>>> laser beam?  In particular, I'm wondering how practical it might be
>>> to take a laser and turn it into a vector display

> Turning sharp corners is the hard part with mechanical
> deflectors like mirrors, as it means very high acceleration of the
> mechanical parts.  I haven't done the math to be sure, but,
> until/unless taught otherwise by testing, I'd feel dubious about
> clipping the X and Y signal bandwidths at anything lower than ~1MHz.

If you want to experiment, you might try to find the mirror/coil 
assemblies from a Pioneer laserdisk player or similar.  They consist of 
a small mirror mounted on a moving coil so as to turn on one axis 
through an angle of some +/-10deg (total 20deg).  They're light enough 
to respond somewhere in the kHz (maybe 10s of kHz) range if you only 
need small deflections, rather than the full 20deg.  I've got one here, 
but never got round to trying it out.

-- 
Pete