Scanning beam device calibration

An article of manufacture comprising:

• a machine-readable medium selected from a floppy diskette, an optical storage medium, an optical disk, a CD-ROM, a magnetic disk, a magneto-optical disk, a read only memory (ROM), a programmable ROM (PROM), an erasable-and-programmable ROM (EPROM), an electrically-erasable-and-programmable ROM (EEPROM), a random access memory (RAM), a static-RAM (SRAM), a dynamic-RAM (DRAM), and a Flash memory, the machine-readable medium storing instructions that if executed result in a machine performing operations including:
• comparing an image of a calibration pattern, which has been acquired with a scanning beam device, with a representation of the calibration pattern,
• calibrating the scanning beam device based on the comparison, wherein calibrating the scanning beam device at least partially accounts for a difference between an actual and an expected position of a scanned beam used to acquire the image of the calibration pattern with the scanning beam device, and
• repeating said acquiring and said comparing one or more times.

An apparatus comprising:

• a light source;
• a scanning optical fiber to receive light from the light source, the scanning optical fiber to vibrate within a Q factor of a resonant frequency and to scan a beam over a calibration pattern in a scan pattern;
• a photodetector to detect light backscattered from the calibration pattern at different times during the scan pattern;
• image generation logic to generate an image of the calibration pattern by representing the backscattered light detected at each of the different times at a corresponding expected position of the beam for a respective time;
• and
• a calibration system including comparison logic to compare the image with a representation of the calibration pattern and to calibrate the apparatus to at least partially account for a difference between the expected positions of the beam and actual positions of the beam during the scan pattern, wherein the calibration system is configured to repeat comparison of images generated by the image generation logic one or more times.