swami makes some lumia
(part 1)
i saw my first lumia projection at gates planetarium in denver. i loved that place. wonka tours of light and sound. boiling clouds and galaxies. patterns. dream fogs. ghosts. i could not figure out for... the .. life.. of me.. how they were made. what aliens taught us to make that light?
magic i thought, and tucked it away for later. i was thirteen. there were girls.
fast forward.
i go to a thing every year. nukestock. a gathering of friends and the kind of family that doesn't depend on blood. the riff-raff of us in the atomic sci-fi town of las cruces. nuclear woodstock. children of the atom. all of us aliens in this desert. we drove motorcycles and made flamethrowers and performance art. now we're scientists, and kernel hackers, and teachers, and doctors. i liked the old ways better.
i always try to bring a little something special to our gatherings.
last year i bought a lumia kit from dz. hankscraft motor and shower glass. got some flexmods and diodes. did a lot of reading and learned some magic. my monkeyhands made a little rgv lumia box. it's sitting on my coffee table. i still use it.
somewhere along the line i developed a habit. i think we all do. we get hungry for more light. stranger reactions. better magic. it gets in our veins like junk and keeps us up at night. we rationalize. it's science. it's physics. it's optics. it's all of those things, but it's none of those things. it's just addiction.
there's this guy... dslijon. he was selling lumia kits with multiple motors and wheels. i bought one. i spent a week experimenting. getting lost in the galaxies. drifting. just thinking. experimenting. closing my eyes and spinning. then i stacked wheels and everything changed. galaxies became organic. spiral arm pseudopods. non-linear complexities. my wall developed a crack into somewhere beautiful.
i got tired of burning my fingers right around the time cheap blue diodes came out. i decided to make something.
i bought dichros from one stop and beam combiners from laserman532. i soldered things too small to see and learned about aligning near field and far. i made white light, grinned big, and reached for diffraction grating.
i needed a box. i think it was heroic and mr.coffee who suggested gator cases. i bought a 6u rack mount case. it was excellent, but plastic and flimsy. i worried about burning holes through it. i bought a bending press and learned to fold sheet metal. i voided warranties.
i bought corner braces and aluminum plates and spent some cozy time with my pal the drill press. there is something gratifying about grinding through 3/8" plate. big pencil shavings of corkscrewed aluminum. spirals of silver worm toothpaste. i keyed one mount with two bolts to keep the corners straight. i learned the hard way not to de-burr the holes with my fingers. i bought bandaids.
i spray painted the inside flat black.
the clock was ticking.. fast. i started getting really worried about finishing before i headed to las cruces.
to correct the bad beams from the blue diodes i designed a module using a cnc bearing mount and a prism pair from p1t8ull.
i needed red, so i built one of laserman532's dual beam kits with a pair of 660 long can diodes. tuned it for 400mW and aligned it at 40 feet. i modified the kit a little by swapping the flexure mount with a micro-mini and the laserwave pbs with a cube from an old hene laserdisk player (thanks mr.coffee). i wired 10k ohm pots on the modulation lines of the blue and red lasers to make brightness adjustments easier.
i recycled an old aixiz green laser and started on layout. i used sticky putty to hold everything in place, then marked positions on the board and drilled holes. once i had everything mounted and aligned, i color balanced for white using a 7:9:1 ratio of blue:red:green.
Last edited by swamidog; 12-02-2010 at 22:54.
suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness.
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Originally Posted by swamidog
would-so love-to, too! (great story! 
....is it just me? Anyone else 'see the light(s)'?... 
....and armed only with his trusty 21 Zorgawatt KTiOPO4...
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