Portal 2’s ’Want You Gone’ Played by CO2 Laser

“Want You Gone“ by Jonathan Coulton played by a Coherent 250W CO2 laser onto two ceramic chips. Inspiration for this video obviously goes to chjade84. I’d been fiddling with lasers and audio for awhile, so I thank you for the specific idea and challenge, the chips came out really well! The big difference between our videos is that while he’s using the laser as an actual instrument, I’m using the resulting plume (ejected material) as a speaker. Same principle as a regular speaker, except I’m using tiny explosions instead of a vibrating cone. Sorry, mono only for now :) I realized early on that trying to raster a bitmap would never work, because the galvo sweeps would cover the entire area regardless of pixel brightness and configuration. All you get is a gray rectangle. So I took a jpeg, ran a trace program to make it into a vector, imported that into the software, and started it running the program. Once the galvos were moving, I started the audio playing, w