A few weeks ago I did some photography of skulls using a laser. After that experiment my friend Vern and I started talking about putting the laser on two servos and making it computer controlled. He built an apparatus for me in a surprisingly short time.

He mounted a $ store laser to a servo to control tilt and mounted that servo to another one to control pan. Simple. He hooked both of these up to a basic stamp controller and mounted them to a board. Then wrote code to make the laser sweep side to side and up and down. 

I took the code he sent me made some modifications and did the first test. You can see from the hires version that it looks like the laser is sweeping past each line twice. I'm not sure why this is.

On the second test I decreased the vertical step so that the lines are closer together and the exposure is longer.

For the third test I made the lines really close together to almost bathe the scene in laser light.

Now I decided it was time to turn it into a grid. So I rewrote the code to sweep left to right while moving top to bottom. Then to switch directions and move top to bottom while sweeping right to left.

The grid came out more regular than I had expected.

For the last test of the evening I just tightened the grid up.

If you are curious here is what the scene looked like with the lights on and with the laser sweeping. You will notice in all the photos that there is a red light on the left hand side. That light is the laser.

Here is the Basic Stamp Code that made the grid.