Laserworks

I glued the thing together, connected the 9v battery and took a quick video.

So cool to have your own electronic fireworks, while other people stick with that basic expensive and dangerous stuff !

It's almost 2016, the human race has almost managed another year, keep up, and remember, it's only a number, it's not actually floating point (real) :)

Video: www.tinkerist.com/laserworks/laserworks-video.mov

I've put the thing together, and it still works. I've added a 9v battery and a small power board set for 4.85v :)

For anyone trying to do this, please note: this is not the proper way to do this. Stressing parts over their limits makes them break, even if the parts are so good they can take it. I guess this will not last a long time.

Final finish somewhere next week.

Currently I am looking into getting some randomness into the tiny system.
I quickly found out that the randomness I used in the program wasn't that at all.

Of course it is very logical that a system that is designed to specifically do a finite type of things, and -not something else- just indeed does the finite type of things and that's it. In that way you won't get bugs, it is designed to be static, so it will be static, very handy. To make a static system do something unstatic (is that a word? ok "dynamic"), like generating a real random number is a little harder.

Even so when using an avr.

Reading a bit on randomness using an avr, I landed on a few pages that describe this problem, questions were asked and answered (as this is not new, but it is for me) and I found some solutions that people have made in the past for this problem.

As per usual, I compiled a list of pages (file: listofpages.txt) that I visited and found some code to play with (see docs-link on the left).

I found getting some randomness into the system by reading the ADC a couple of times, and using the results as a seed quite interesting.

As for my solution to this problem, I am going to test reading some static on the ADC on another avr (with serial, so I can printf some characters) to see if that yields significant results.

While I'm still waiting on the laser diodes to arrive, I've made a simple setup with LED's, and made a little program that seems good enough to do the job. Again, nothing fancy, and yes this is all quite simple. So while the code is done and seems to work good enough, I can continue about my business... and you can too!

..pondering what I should use as smoke.. or mirrors perhaps...god this will blind people.. let's point them upwards ..

Oh and the fibers are for interesting displayal of more but tiny lasor beamz.

Not sure if that will work, we'll see.