Very cool, I will enjoy seeing your tests. :beer:
This is the Gball nubm06 on steel with safety glasses in front of the cam.
This is 8 feet even.
Did I mention I will buy a some more of these?
I will put this Gball son of a gun right into some Cylindrical pairs, I was going to mount it in that long nose 1.25 inch heatsink I just made and play with round lenses, but I think I might do a 2 inch sink with a shelf and throw a pair of 6X in front of it and see what I can get. It might make nearly a square and at 8 feet that would be a mean son of a gun....did I mention I want some more of these.
p.s. The height of the line may be the limiting factor after a Cyl pair for the wider diverging horizontal axis, but it's nothing a telescopic reduction wouldn't fix or a beam expander, still with a cyl pair and the stock Gball these could make mean as heck 0-20 foot burners, and the price range makes them very attractive.
We saw Styro use a low power lens in front of a block, there is more than one way to skin this cat and I an a big fan of more power, the future of these may well be a lensed can like this so now is a good time to sort it anyway.
EDIT:
This pic is at 8 feet but it was only at 2 amps, when I went back to 4.5 the height got taller, almost double. I need to do some distance test and see if the propagation is linear, this may need a 2ns Cyl pair turned 90 degrees to rein the slow axis al well, but at 5% loss that's no problem.
The overall output is a lot less line like but bigger, maybe a round beam expander would be a good way, I need to mot be so excited and compile lots of distance test, 5 feet 10, 15, 20 and compare the ratios, but I may well work out with round lenses. I'm going to get a 15 foot and compare the width height ratio, the 8 foot is almost twice as high at 4.5 amps. These could be stacked 3 or 4 in a row and shrunk to a point with a round lens, that's kind of the projector layout, stackable parallel beam blocks.....round lenses could work, let me shut up and go get a 15 foot measure.
Ok I see what's going on here, the Gball has a longer FL and the beam does not diverge as fast as a G2 but the line height is taller, so total spot volume may be close, but the Gball has a lot more square output, making round lenses more feasible.
At 15 feet the line is 1.25 inches long but it is almost 5/16 tall, so shorter but taller...or a more square output...that'd good for bigger round lenses such as expanders.