Was cruising through my Facebook groups, and saw this… and honestly, I don’t know why I didn’t put two-and-two together before.
I could definitely see this being a thing that would boost lasing speed via a replacement head on the Glowforge… (for those who it’s not obvious to: Glowforge could put additional reflection mirrors in the head assembly so the gantry doesn’t need to move as much over a spot… but this particular Chinese laser is – as far as I know – all contained in that one head itself)
unfortunately can’t view on mobile but i assume this is a laser with (functionally) spinning mirrors used to direct the laser beam instead of an xy gantry? i’ve thought about this before; i figured it could be used to create a future rotary attachment for smallish items that could still fit entirely within the bed.
i think you could do whole cups that way if you didn’t really have to move the gantry much.
It looks to be a combo of the two as the head does move, then stops and shoots, then moves. Has the potential for some interesting side cuts. The basis for a laser router???
The biggest problem is introducing more moving parts. Calibration and maintenance issues ratchet up. Not out of the question but something that would take some work.
I used to run a laser projection system that had pole mounted projectors at the end of a couple of hundred feet of fiber. In a several years of operation none of the galvanometers failed but a couple of the shutters did. While the projectors worked well we did have to re-polish the glass fibers on the laser table every eight months as the 60 argon laser would eventually fry them - that’s after splitting the beam half a dozen times.
Another issue might be with material thicker than paper. Your cuts are all going to be at different angles. Think kerf is difficult to figure out? It would be even crazier with the cuts being a fraction of a degree different.
Still, even with the shortcomings I think it has a lot of potential.
The laser would likely destroy the DLP chip. Galvanometer scanners are common enough that there would be plenty of ready made solutions.
I’ve never built one but the setup was pretty nice. It was a six foot tube and the laser table was setup for full color if we added a krypton laser. After combining the beams it was split and sent out six or seven fibers to the projectors. The beams were then projected onto the inside of a large dome.
This was at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. While I had to maintain the laser, I spent most of my time working on the animatronics both in the Emerald City and the casino. That was a lot of fun and when I would work on the Foster Brooks animatronic it would always draw a crowd. After I opened it up it looked like a cross between a drunk and the Terminator.
It could be called the Disco Head… 
