Galvo

Objectives

As a followup to my previous efforts to control a CRT, I have resurrected a setup that I did quite a long time ago to control a laser beam. I have done several attempts, using a handmade galvo and a moving mirror.

Here are picture of the two setups:

There are also two short videos here and there .

Needless to say, these attemprs were unsuccessful. So I ended up buying a readymade mage galvo from China (simlilar to this one). The galvo comes with a +15/-15v power suply and two drivers (one for each mirror).

The only things that remain to be done are

to generate the ILDA signals to drive the mirrors (via the drivers) from two 0-5v signals generated by an Arduino micro and a couple of DACs (this is explained below).
to write the piece of software to the generate patterns to display.

Schematics

The schematics is basically the one proposed at [1].

Please note that the 5V used for the microcontroller / DACs is obtained from the 15V power supply. I am not sure that a genuine 7805 will appreciate the 10V shift... So I'll use some of the nice 3-pin step-down replacements such as: