Re: Laser x-y game

At 03:14 PM 5/28/97 PDT, you wrote:

>Maybe some mechanical engineer/genius can come up with a better way to
>deflect the beam? The hardest part doesn't seem to be getting the beam
>there fast, it's stopping it once your there. Your going to need very fast,
>tightly controlled servos.

If the problem can be solved by keeping the deflection extraordinarily
small, one could spread the resulting beam optically, either by reflecting
the result of a curved mirror or simply running it through a projection lens.

It seems like this might work because the limiting factor is how fast you
can mechanically move the mirrors around, which rises as the square of the
velocity (KE = 1/2 mv^2). So if you halve the picture size you require
four times less energy to deflect.

There is a (soft) minimum deflection angle as the amount of deflection
approaches the beam width, which would not result in a resolvable picture.
So the vectors might be excessively wide.

// grigs
Received on Wed May 28 20:22:45 1997