Science Forum

Pong · Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 3:17 am Post subject:

So I've played around with the now cheaply available micro planes and helicopters, and also the small consumer lasers, and hacked apart a few old disc drives. I see some disconnected technologies that might come together as an invention.

Since the main constraints in toy aircraft now are all about the batteries, I think they'd be better laser powered... if laser powered can be done. In this case one could simply power the laser off a wall outlet or car adaptor.

Also the possibility of something that is NOT A TOY along these lines. Perhaps a survey tool or I dunno.

I've imagined two embodiments.

The first is definitely r/c toy-like. You would have a hand-held controller that bounces laser light off a finely adjustable mirror inside the controller housing. This mirror would orient automatically, something like the innards of an optical drive. But to get on with it, the laser light would then head out to the r/c plane or whatever, which is basically a bit of Styrofoam with a tiny motor, and be collected by a receiver say mounted as an antenna. Why does the light not miss the plane? Well because the receiver detects deviation of the laser light hitting off-target, and echoes back an encoded fraction of light to the control unit. This stream of feedback allows for fast & fine adjustments of the little mirror, thus the laser beam... tracking speed should easily exceed the toy's aerodynamic capability, jittery handed operators included. I'm pretty confident our optical tracking has come this far, and dirt cheap too, thanks to disc drive technology.

Make sense? I wonder though if there's a cheap and lightweight means of converting laser light to aircraft thrust or power for the engine/motor. I assume the light applied to the aircraft would be relative overkill and wasteful, since we're not using batteries remember.

The second embodiment is a bare-bones chain of such devices, that mainly just hover in position. Here I imagine each node would have a lens or reflectors to relay light to the next node, and so forth. Each node would draw off a fraction of energy to keep itself aloft and hold a fixed position. I think there might be some direct & dynamic way to do this with simple mechanism... i.e. the "mechanism" is the node body. Anyway the cuteness of this arrangement is that it's like a dynamically stable articulated arm, that can reach around or over: you might have a camera, projector, or beacon on the terminal node; freely taking perspectives, relaying data, or occupying space not otherwise practical.

As with first embodiment the transmission loss and conversion efficiency may be terrible, because our power source is overkill for the flimsy application.
_________________
A pong by any other name is still a pong. -williampinn