The starting point here is a question plenty of us have asked: can a homemade laser be sequenced in xLights like any regular fixture? PK Cubed clearly set out to find out, and the answer turned out to be yes.
The hardware is a mix of bargain modules and careful circuitry. An RGB laser head and a galvo assembly came from AliExpress, with the galvo kit including its own power supply and controller. The driver side follows an Instructables guide on Arduino laser shows with real galvos, built around an opamp and an SPI DAC plus other parts ordered from Digikey. The brain is an Olimex ESP32-POE board the maker already had on the shelf. Custom code takes DMX over E1.31 sACN and treats the laser as a group of moving heads inside xLights. A 3D printed enclosure houses the whole unit.
To show it off, the projector sits in a miniature Lego DJ stage. A 16x64 LED matrix forms the rear video wall, with roughly 250 more pixels covering the rest of the set, including strip towers, running lights and overhead spotlights, all running on 5V from WT32-ETH01 Ethernet ESP32 boards. Beams come out in green, cyan, purple, red and yellow through haze, with arrays that cross and fan out plus cone effects locked to the rhythm and drops of the music.
The cost breakdown is refreshingly open: about $100 for the laser and galvo assemblies plus one more Ethernet ESP32, with the galvos at $52, the RGB laser at $15.58 plus around $6 shipping, $30 of components from Digikey, and less than $10 of filament for the case. A few things stay open. The enclosure is still a work in progress, the galvo control board and other parts run a little warm so a small fan is planned, and the maker warns that the WT32-ETH01 is tedious to program without a USB port or built-in USB-to-UART.
Project by PK Cubed. Watch it on their YouTube channel: