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Sam’s lasers sells some refurbished HP laser interferometers on eBay (HP5517 head+the receivers). He has also worked with someone to supply open source software
by new299 7y ago
Sam’s lasers sells some refurbished HP laser interferometers on eBay (HP5517 head+the receivers). He has also worked with someone to supply open source software/counting electronics. My notes on the kit are here:
http://41j.com/blog/2017/02/hp-interferometer-notes/ http://41j.com/blog/2017/02/hp-interferometer-notes/
You can often pick up the laser/receivers/optics quite cheap (few hundred USD). And then just use the software supplied by Sam. The Sam kit is tested which is nice (but it’s ~1000USD IIRC).
Interferometers as used on high end CNCs often.
- colechristensen 7y agoThere is a cool effect where a laser reflecting back into itself will cause interference inside the laser diode and affect the power required to drive it in a measurable way and with it you can extract a surprising amount of information (distance, rotation, angle, speed, etc.) I was ... hasty ... with my first laser diode and burned it out in about 30 seconds. I like to tell myself the money wasted was spent on learning lessons. The second is coming in the mail. The upshot with this method is that it can be extremely low cost and give you access to write code that interfaces directly with physics instead of somebody else's device. The idea for hacking on these things comes from Ben Krasnow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUdro-6u2Zg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUdro-6u2Zg and several research papers.
- jbay808 7y agoThis is known as a self-mixing interferometer (as is explained in the video) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-mixing_interferometry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-mixing_interferometry