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What Could You Do With 120 Laser Pointers?
lazed-dazed asks: "I've recently come into possession of a large number (120 of 'em) of keychain laser pointers (minus the fancy diffraction adapters, though the specs are the same). So, Slashdot, I ask you: Can you give me any project ideas for these low-wattage bad boys? Holograms? Fancy cigarette lighters? Laser cannons? The crazier, the better! Oh, and don't bother suggesting cat toys."
and attach it to some tree branch.
that + some wind should look eery enough when it's foggy.
oh yeah attach some death trap it to keep it from being stolen.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Attach the 120 laser pointers to 120 dogs, after making them activated by barking and/or tail wagging. Release dogs at a cat show.
Get 120 ill-tempered sea bass and a lair. Also Elizabeth Hurley and/or Heather Graham. Actually you could pretty much skip the bass.
Step 1: Procure 120 sharks Step 2: ..oh nevermind.. too obvious
and place a speaker nearby. Install a proximity trigger. If triggered, light up all pointer and have the speaker bark "FREEZE! POLICE! PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPON AND LIE ON THE GROUND! [small pause] DON'T EVEN THINK OF IT, PUNK!"
For a better effect, let each pointer move veeeery slightly. And if you want, you can add a nice gunshot.
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
Just buy 120 sensors which can recognize laser
o m. Put a
light, a ton of wires, a loud electronic horn,
and a computer to connect them to.
Then you can build your very own 'I-have-
something-very-expensive-to-protect'-ro
tux or your favorite CBN-Shrine in the middle and
place sensors and lasers at the walls crossing
the room in a wild way.
Congratulations, the room is now safe from
intruders. (at least you will hear them if they
come.)
cy
PS: Hey... you could practice to come thru there
without hitting the beams like in these movies,
where they try to steal a huge diamond, some
prototype chips or a very tasty peanut butter
sandwich. Choose what you prefer to reach...
Reading this signature is senseless so don't do it.
Form the lasers into a grid say 15x8 or 17x7 and set them in some plastic let say ... polyethene resin. And rig them up with a hand held computer and (hand waving) a couple of relays.
You will then be able to project messages on the people, walls, cars. Insert funny messages here...
OK, remember the dude who put a couple dozen LED's on a spinning arm (think windmill) and triggered them at just the right time, so when the arm span, he'd have graphics or text or whatever in mid-air.
Place all 120 of them on an arm, but spin it around its own length (think driveshaft) in the middle of a room. If you were able to control them individually (even though they were spinning) you could have whatever graphics you wanted on the walls.
Can they, together, be seen bounced off the cloud cover? With more powerful batteried? Could they be arrayed to make a pair of angry red eyes? Could this be centered over a nearby religious institution? Could they, with servos, be used to trace out picutres of the goatse.cx guy in a fashion similar to the goatse.cx guy jack-o-lantern? If someone did that, say..., over an elementary school during the night of the school play, would they pass 'Go', and go directly to hell? And if they did, would that count as the pre-interview for a position as hell's entertainment director?
I don't think so. Even if they were putting out the maximum 5mW of power (which they're not) that's still only 0.6 Watts. The smallest and weakest soldering irons out there are probably at least 10 to 20 times that much power, and they'd have a tough time melting anything but very small pads.
And, even more importantly, it's not going to be very focused. If you look at the spot a laser pointer makes it's more of a blob, the optics on these things are NOT meant to be very accurate. Plus, with 120 of them, there's almost zero chance that they'd all be aimed at exactly the same spot. In order for cutting lasers to be useful they have to be highly focused and concentrated in a very small spot, much like the whole magnifying-glass-starts-fires trick thing.
I think you'd have a better chance of getting something to light by rubbing sticks together.
Get a huge ballon and a tank of helium. Inflate huge ballon. Attach laser pointers to it turn them all on and let it flaot away. Then put on the local TV news and wait for reports to come in. Extra points in your are near to an airport or airforce base. ;)
Warning! This post may contain a pun!
Why not sell 119 of them on e-bay and use the proceeds to buy a fat cat.
Kids today are tyrants. They contradict their parent, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers. - Socrates 400 BC
Take out security cameras in a good chunk of downtown London....
Laser pointers nicely mess up video camera... It probably won't hurt the camera, but here is a fun read if you have a bit of time on your hands.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Astronaut: Houston control, we have a problem. The Russians have painted the moon read.
Houston: Apollo command, do you have any white paint? Repeat, do you have white paint on board?
Astronaut: Affirmative, Houston control
Houston: Apollo command, put a Coca Cola logo on it.
(runs for cover)
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Or alternatively take a few friends to watch a protest rally from a nearby building and shine the laser pointers onto the protestors. Might freak a few out if they thought snipers were watching them. Especially effective when they are protesting a high profile person like Bush.
Warning! This post may contain a pun!
You will need:
322,951 crewmen
Several million tons of quadanium steel
Approx. 950,000 troopers in cool white plastic uniforms
One (1) small moon at the outer edges of the known galaxy at which to construct the thing.
...
Here are some technical specs, and a handy diagram.
Basically, you do the following:
(1) Use all the steel to build this gigantic metal ball, with a dimple on one side. You use a huge rubber band (available at your friendly neighborhood hardware store) to hold the laser pointers together, and put them in the dimple (make sure the batteries are always charged.) Get all your 1.5-odd million crew guys and troops on board, and fire the bitch up.
(2)
(3)profit!
Warning: Warranty void in case of attack by swarms of rebel fighters and small foam balls.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Yeah, great idea, get yourself shot.
For your birthday, we have a plan to write your name into the moon.
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
Then imagine the fun of a whole bunch of pranksters doing 20 to life at Ft. Leavenworth.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Set them up in your garden so that they form a grid with sensors to detect when beams are broken. Write some software to generate a grid reference from this data so that any object breaking the beams can be tracked to it's sector - B6, E2 etc. Draw a diagram of the grid and print it out. Send copies to your friends.
Output the grid reference to a web page - it should now be relatively easy for your friends to track your exact position in the garden while talking on the phone
and drive downhill through a foggy town in the dark.
Go to bed.
Get up and read the newspaper(s).
LOL
The checkbox said "Requires Windows 98, NT, or better. And so I installed Linux
Attach about 30 of them to two gloves, and go dancing.
Attach an AC adapter and mount a row of them above the front door, aiming down.
Give them away at a local school. The teachers would love that.
Drill holes into a thick wooden board, mounting the pointers upwards under a sheet of transparent plastic or glass. Sacrifice an audio LED controller or two to synchronize the beams to music. Learn to dance.
Attach them all to a single trigger, and mount them together with a large amount of tape. Keep in your glovebox. When someone cuts you off, aim at their rear-view mirror.
Build your own really inefficient 3D scanner.
Can you say, Flash Mob?
The ______ Agenda
Shine lots of beams across your living room, set up a fog making machine, and see if Catherine Zeta Jones turns up...
The next morning, call your friend and ask him how the girl was in bed.
Put them all in a frame, each pointing at a phototransistor, and link to a frequency generator or microcontroller with MIDI output. Now you have a laser harp.
In fact, here's a very informative website on the subject: The 250 laser harp project. Includes links to different projects, schematics, part sources, etc.
...
If there is a quicker way to get yourself shot, I don't know of it.
Find 119 friends. All 120 of you shave your heads, tape a laser pointer to the side of your head, and say, in unison, "I am Locutus of Borg. Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated."
Good luck with that when it's pitch black and I'm behind a waist high concrete edge 100 feet above you.
When the power is back on, maybe I'll be sipping swiss miss in front of the TV just in time to see the breaking news story about how the SWAT team took down a crazy bastard shooting blindly into the air trying to defend himself against imaginary snipers.
Like everyone else on the internet you talk tough. But, hey, 'talk': It really is cheap. So knock yourself out.
attach them to sharks... and have sharks with friken laser beams attached to their heads!
--Dr. Evil
This sig is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
I did this once. A cheap radio shack photocell tied to +5 volts via an active output pin on your parallel port, with the other end of the photocell going to an input pin on that same port, will cause that input pin to read 0 when little or no ambient lighting is present. When hit by a red laser pointer the resistance across the photocell is lowered and the voltage at the input pin ramps up above the binary threshold, to more than ~0.8 volt but less than 5 volts. Because of this, reading the input pin from software when the photocell is lit by a laser beam shows a binary value of 1. To avoid false alarms from stray light, I housed the photocell in a sealed, opaque box with a hole in it for the laser beam to enter and hit the photocell.
A simple C program that reads and writes the memory address of the parallel port can detect, log, and act on these "laser trip" events, doing something as simple as beeping, or as complex as taking a picture and asking for a code. The program should write a 1 to the bit that controls the output pin you are using so that +5 volts appears on it. It should then repeatedly read the input pin you are using. When the input pin transitions from 1 to 0, even for a moment, you know the laser beam has been cut.
The quick and dirty C code to do parallel port operations under linux can be found at here. For beginners I suggest you use one of control bits/pins as your output and one of the status bits/pins as your input. The data bits/pins are bi-directional and must be configured for input or output, and using them makes things slightly more complicated. If you want to get really fancy try using the parallel port IRQ to detect the transition from 1 to 0, this should save processing power by avoiding an expensive loop to check the state of the input pin constantly.
If you need a little more background on the parallel port before diving in, check out this resource
Finally, the above description is for a single laser beam. I used a mirror to bounce a single beam around, to get greater coverage, and to provide the effect of multiple beams in the presence of aerosol or powder. You should be able to support thirteen independent laser beams on a single parallel port, using the data bits/pins and the status bits/pins combined.