So now with all the hard work done its time to fiddle with the lasers. As you can see while we are very close considering there was no effort for alignment upfront we are actually very close. I found that the misalignment was caused by the lenses inside the laser mounts them self’s. After opening one of the lasers I found the plastic lenses had a small burr on them from being manufactured. Using a razor and a steady hand I was able to fix the alignment issue. A tip to save trouble here is get lasers with glass lenses.
With the lenses fixed and a very slight tweak to the lasers position we have our laser hitting the mark. The dot is very small and it is important to get this as close to center as possible.
With the laser centered we then will intentionally unfocused the laser. Yep! That’s right unfocused. Basically we need to make the dot bigger to get the best coverage on our sensor.
So here we have our finished project. I forgot to mention that I added some screen to the hole as a finishing touch to make the appearance polished. With this basic setup we have reviewed here there is a good deal of extension of features you can do. I recommend the wave shield for arduino as well as midi output (its actually very easy) as great places to start. Also, we used 9 lasers yet there are 8 notes. I used this 9th laser for an octave shift, but it could be used for many different things from sustaining a note to instrument changing…. Really there is a ton of options and as usual we encourage you to experiment.
