>> Light show hobby. You'd probably know, then - what's the fastest way to deflect a laser beam? In particular, I'm wondering how practical it might be to take a laser and turn it into a vector display on a handy blank wall - but that requires some very fast acceleration of the spot, probably faster than mechanical deflection can support (though if I'm wrong I'd love to know it). For example, does piezoelectricity make a crystal distort enough to use it as an optical deflection element in such a scheme? (My guess is no, but I don't actually know.)
I have SPARCstations with cg6s that I can use as vector displays, but they are vectors converted to raster. I'd like to do real vector - a parallel port driving a couple of moderately fast D->A converters might be able to do it; it might take something better, dunno. But without the deflection mechanism there's no point in even trying to design the rest of it. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B