My friend Tod Kurt and I built this laser tripwire art heist event for the Machine Project Benefit. Here’s what it looked like:
We’re using a hazer to make the laser beams visible, which works surprisingly well in this semi-open space. To increase the spectacle we installed a few extra lasers that are not being sensed for tripwires, but just look cool. The heisters didn’t know which those were, however, so it added to the challenge without increasing complexity.
In this side view you can see what happens when you break too many beams: lots of lights come on, including a blinding, red LED array. For this Tod used an Arduino-controlled AC optical relay. I’m hoping Tod will write up the whole project for a MAKE article, because he has all kinds of neat tricks like this throughout.
The event was fantastic. People got very competitive about getting the art stolen in the shortest time. Most adept thieves did it in about 20 seconds, but the top three scores were between 5 and 7 seconds!!
Hi John,
I did a similar thing a few years ago for a young boy who wanted to protect his room from a snooping sister. :) I found it difficult to align the bounce mirrors if there was more than one of them. How are you keeping the bounce mirrors in place?
Hi Alan, that’s awesome, brings back memories of all sorts of traps and counter-traps my sister and I used to set! We didn’t use any bounce mirrors at all, just lots of lasers.
Actually, we did have one mirror spinning on a motor to create a sweeping laser beam, but that one wasn’t sensed, just used for effect.