Guy turns a Bluray player laser into a scanning microscope!

[thewayne]

This article appeared about a month ago. It's pretty cool. Using an Arduino, some C and Javascript coding and a little motor control, he has the laser scanning in one axis while being moved along the other axis and producing a monochrome image.

I haven't watched the video in the Gizmodo article, I'm curious if he harvested anything from the Bluray player aside from the laser and maybe the power supply. It would probably be better to buy a stepper motor controller for this purpose than to try to repurpose one from a player, but at least you'd know that the power supply from the player would meet the laser diode's specs and you could probably tap it to provide power for the rest of your gadget.

https://gizmodo.com/blu-ray-player-scanning-laser-microscope-hack-youtube-1849914455

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/12/21/2245214/old-blu-ray-players-can-be-turned-into-microscopes

Comments

[disneydream06]

Wouldn't it just be easier to get a microscope?
Says the guy who knows nothing about this stuff. lol...
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

Repurposing stuff is cool!  And clever!  If you need a microscope for serious work, that's a different matter.

[disneydream06]

Good point. :)

[richardf8]

Watched the gizmodo video. He repurposed most of the transport and sensors. He had a fabricator provide him with a frame and carriage for the sample bed.

[thewayne]

I wish I had better electronics chops.  RasPi and Arduino is something that I'd really like to work with, I have the latter and the former is in pretty short supply.

[silveradept]

That's an impressive hack, and now I wonder what someone might do with such a thing and microdot printing or other tiny, tiny formats.