I woke up Thursday morning with the solution to my laser harp woes: to solve the problem of being able to align each of the lasers individually, I will put them all on tripod mounting platforms so that they can be adjusted. I came up with a few iterations of this design, shifting around the mechanism that holds the adjustment length. It is not clear to me which is the most practical solution. The main choices are a solution where the main part is threaded and one where a tension spring is used to hold the position. I might end up building a few of each to see which works out best. I happen to know someone with a laser cutter that could build some of these up for me, which would be really pretty. Here are some concept sketches I did (using qcad community edition, an open source CAD program) to demonstrate the options that are being considered.
I’ve been dipping into your blog a bit lately – some really interesting stuff…
I solved the alignment issue with my first harp by mounting the receptors on a long strip of fridge magnet (magnetic metal would work too) and then putting each receptor on it’s own magnetic base, then I could nudge them around when needed.
Thanks Steve! That sounds like a pretty rad solution- much simpler than the tripod setup I have at each laser :-).