{"id":842418,"date":"2026-08-03T20:10:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T20:10:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/842418\/"},"modified":"2026-08-03T20:10:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T20:10:15","slug":"congratulations-to-the-frikkin-laser-winners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/842418\/","title":{"rendered":"Congratulations To The Frikkin Laser Winners!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apparently you all love lasers just as much as we do. We put out a challenge to use, build, or otherwise abuse our favorite coherent light sources, and you responded. Some of the projects had been in the works for quite a while and were ridiculously polished, some were whipped together on the fly just for the contest, and we truly enjoyed both.<\/p>\n

We only have three $150 DigiKey gift certificates to give out, though, so without further ado, we present to you\u2026<\/p>\n

The Winners<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Our judges\u2019 favorite project was [Jacob]\u2019s CubeRaman<\/a>, and it\u2019s not hard to see why. A Raman spectrometer shines laser light at an object and catches the reflection, filtering all of the original laser wavelength out. What remains are photons that have interacted with electrons in the atoms that make up the target itself, and come back at a shifted wavelength. Comparing the spectrum of this Raman reflection with a database of known spectra tells you what it is made of.<\/p>\n

This is by no means an easy project, but [Jacob]\u2019s documentation, careful selection of parts to buy used and parts to build, coupled with a clever 3D-printed mounting system make it plausible for the home gamer. We love seeing out-of-reach science gear brought into reach, and we know we\u2019ll be keeping an eye on this project in the future.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Next up, we had [Kyle Mayer]\u2019s Measuring Microns with Lasers,<\/a> which is a DIY laser rangefinder, but for measuring very small distances \u2014 under a centimeter \u2014 with precision. Like many laser optical rangefinders, this bounces a laser off the target and collects the light on a line sensor, using the angle at which the light returns to figure out how far the target is.<\/p>\n

[Kyle]\u2019s implementation uses three of these measurement heads and produces a reading that is precise down to 0.25 \u03bcm nearly 5,000 times per second. This puts it in league with devices that you have to request a quote for, so you probably don\u2019t want to have to afford them.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>And finally, an art project! [AJRussell]\u2019s Glow Engine<\/a> is a beautiful take on a familiar laser trick: shining a blue laser at glow-in-the-dark materials to leave persistent traces. Scan the laser over the phosphorescent screen, and you have something like a CRT, only in [AJ]\u2019s case, a very very slow CRT.<\/p>\n

The beauty here lies in the details. [AJ] chose high quality strontium aluminate for the glowing, and used high resolution encoders and the open-source SimpleFOC motor driver firmware to get the spots in the right place. Snippets of old hard drive platters make fantastic mirrors. All in all, a super implementation that we\u2019re pretty sure looks even better in the real world.<\/p>\n

Honorable Mentions<\/p>\n

We always come up with a few honorable mention categories to give you all some inspiration. And it also gives us a nice excuse to feature some more sweet projects.<\/p>\n

Lightshow<\/p>\n

We wanted to see pretty displays of laser light. [Daniel Ross]\u2019s Laser Oscilloscope 360<\/a> not only draws out pretty waveforms, but it does so in prime steampunk style. Both [Owen Trueblood]\u2019s Laser Cyanotypes<\/a> and [GRNCH]\u2019s Scored: Laser Woodblock Prints<\/a> flip the script, making beautiful images from lasers, but not the way we intended. Kudos.<\/p>\n

DIY<\/p>\n

We wanted to see what laser-involved projects you were building yourselves, from scratch. While we were shocked that we had no TEA laser entries, [Armin Bindzus]\u2019s Versatile Laser Processing Machine<\/a> more than made up for it. It\u2019s a pulsed-laser do-everything machine that we\u2019re absolutely jealous to see made real. And if you don\u2019t think there\u2019s some real laser DIY going on here, you\u2019ve never maintained a q-switched diode pumped Nd:YAG laser.<\/p>\n

With Remaining Eye<\/p>\n

This was our catch-all category for doing basically anything else with lasers. It turns out that what you all mostly wanted to do was science. [Matt Venn] used a fast-rise-time laser driver to Measure the Speed of Light at Home<\/a>, and got damn good results considering the 2 m baseline. [Tim] put together a 3D Printed Optical Cavity<\/a> interferometer on a budget.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t all labcoats and pocket protectors. [WeldingRod1]\u2019s Laser Bandsaw<\/a> is basically as bad an idea as it sounds like it is. Please, please wear eye protection!<\/p>\n

\"Laser <\/a> <\/p>\n

Laser Oscilloscope 360\u2032 <\/p>\n

\"Laser <\/a> <\/p>\n

Laser Cyanotypes <\/p>\n

\"Scored: <\/a> <\/p>\n

Scored: Laser Woodblock Prints from Generative Art <\/p>\n

\"Versatile <\/a> <\/p>\n

Versatile Laser Processing Machine <\/p>\n

\"Measuring <\/a> <\/p>\n

Measuring the speed of light at home <\/p>\n

\"3D <\/a> <\/p>\n

3D Printed Optical Cavity <\/p>\n

\"Laser <\/a> <\/p>\n

Laser Bandsaw <\/p>\n

Thanks again to DigiKey for sponsoring the contest. We\u2019re sure that our winners will find whatever they need for their next laser project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Apparently you all love lasers just as much as we do. We put out a challenge to use,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":842419,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[64,63,292,128],"class_list":["post-842418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-physics","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-physics","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=842418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842418\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/842419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=842418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=842418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=842418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}