HexastormFinally after all these years a laser direct image using a prism and PCB motor.
PCB motors have come a long way on Hackaday!
On the left you see an exposure with Ricoh polygon mirror motor and on the right you see the exposure with the PCB motor.
Both use prisms.
The quality of the PCB motor exposure is less, still you can see the concept is working.
I believe this is not due to the quality of the substrate but because I look for the diode between a period fraction of 0.999 and 1.001 for the ricoh motor and between 0.900 and 1.100 for the pcb motor. As such, there is much more back light for the PCB motor. This is explains the blue hue.
@gravis
I ran into a small issue where my stepper motors overheated. As such, I could not expose large areas.
After reducing the current to my stepper motor the setup started working.
I can now expose larger areas, the area is 65 mm by 65 mm. The area is exposed in 13 sweeps and one sweep is around 10K lines. I do half a step per lane. The material is quite old, had it for years and needs a lot of light.
Possibly the chemistry is not as good as it was.
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Congratulations because this is amazing! It's been a long journey but I can't understate how impressed I am with the PCB motor. My only suggestion is to optimized the CNC part to be more aerodynamic. I have the vague sense that you said the shape is to due a manufacturing restriction so alternative manufacturing seems advisable. For prototyping, it seems like the UV goo-based 3d printing would be a good approach and injection molding for production. Anyway, this is all super green!
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I decided to put the PCB motor on the back burner. It is interesting for systems with multiple lasers and as route for R&D but would not recommend it for practical usage at the moment. Performance is key when it comes to laser scanning. Consumers are probably more interested in something that works than whether or not is uses a PCB motor.
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