The Shooting Star Generator

To continue my juvenile fascination with making things that light up, here's the shooting star generator. This device creates streaks of light that look like meteor trails in the night sky, as in the video below.

The shooting star effect is created by sliding an aperture through a cross-shaped laser beam. See my earlier post "Green Lasers" for details on the laser. I built the sliding aperture with a rotating disk that has holes in it, 3D printed as in the picture below. In addition to the laser beam sampling holes, I put a opening in the middle of the disk for placement of a Technic axle.

I used an EV3 Medium Motor to spin the disk, with the motor driven by a Bit:Booster. As described in my post "The Bit:Booster", there's no need to drive the motor with an EV3 Intelligent Brick in this simple task to spin the motor at a specified constant speed. This easy task can be accomplished with the Bit:Booster. Since the Micro:bit and Bit:Booster both have LEDs onboard, I programmed these to add to the show. A close-up video of the motor and LED action is below, and Python code for the Micro:bit is at the bottom of the screen.