Today is the birthday of the LASER beam - it’s 48.

From Wikipedia:

The first working laser was demonstrated on May 16, 1960 by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories.[2] Since then, lasers have become a multi-billion dollar industry. The most widespread use of lasers is in optical storage devices such as compact disc and DVD players, in which the laser (a few millimeters in size) scans the surface of the disc. Other common applications of lasers are bar code readers, laser printers and laser pointers.

Google did a nice logo today - spelling out “GOOGLE” with lasers and mirrors.

Which I will put here until someone from Google tells me to remove it.

I made some progress today - it looks like the majority of the components used in the PixArt hookup here:

http://www.kako.com/neta/2007-001/2007-001.html

Are for creating a clean 25Mhz clock signal from a bare crystal. If I buy a crystal oscillator, in place of a bare crystal, then I don’t have to worry about any of that stuff, I can just plug the output from the oscillator straight into the sensor.

I have to film the laser harp for MakeTV this weekend so I have to wait until that’s complete before trashing the WiiMote to get the camera out…