A little something different

Hey all,

I am stewing on an idea, and I have a question - hopefully there's a simple answer out there...

I'd like to make something similar to an old-school radar screen. It'd be a disc with a hole in the center. Thru the hole in the center, there woiuld be a small FS mirror mounted at a 45 degree angle on the end of a stepper motor shaft. Said mirror reflects the beam into the edge of the plastic inside the center hole, radially shining towards the perimeter.


Q: is there a transparent and/or translucent solid medium (ie: plexiglass) that get excited, by lower power lasers? I need to use lower powers to avoid burning anything.

I thought about using water with some highlighter ink in it, but bringing water into the picture is probably more trouble than it's worth, and that leads me to a solid...

Any advice would be vastly appreciated...

Yes I have personal seen some orange plexiglass that was fluorescent under UV light, this sounds like a cool project.

I used to repair radar repeaters when I was in the navy. a repeater is the module and screen that the operator looks at.

Good luck let us know how it goes...

joyee said:

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Click to expand...

Joyee - wanna give a great look to your leisure then interact with me...

thanks for looking, but it seems you're a-spamming....

GoolGaul: To get the right effect, get some phosphorescent (glow in the dark) paints. You'll want to use some that have fast decay, however, so that your beam sweep only makes a short train behind it. Maybe some shadow paint? Then use a 405nm laser to light it up using line-generator optics (or just angle it nicely).

O-like has some line generating optics you could use.

Make sure you do a good job with the paint too. Fluorescent markers and other inks will lose their fluorescing ability after a short time. I think you can seal in the glow paint such that it'll last a very long time.

or... Uranium Glass.

but that's gonna co$t.

I'm going to have to pay a visit to my pals at the local glass shop and see what they have that I can shine a laser through...