B&W Tek BWB-10-OEM - 473nm 10mW

How can you tell? Was the box all beaten to heck when you got it?

the front lens was knocked out of its place and the acrylic stand Xplorer made for the driver had a huge crack in it.

Shit, I'm sorry to hear you're having problems with it.
It could be possible that the crystals got nudged out of alignment during shipping. :undecided:
When I had it, it would eventually stabilize after it warmed up (about 10 minutes).

-Tony

I just got mine. Cold it makes 3mW and eventually warms up to 5/6 mWs. Looks very stable. I would like to get more and use it for my big lumia projector but what I have read here and at PL and considering my level of experience I dont think that will happen. I have very little understanding about what most I have read even means. Maybe at SELEM somebody will take pity on me and help me get the output up a little.

but thanks anyway to all who worked on these and posted thier results.

Anyone have any info on the PSU? How much volts/current does it produce. Are the outputs all the same or different? What does the pot do?

Each driver is likely matched/tuned to the head it's attached too. How the pots affect the output highly depends on which driver version you have, though nobody really has any hard documentation on these. I tried asking B&W but they were.. less than helpful.. so to speak.

Knowing what the pots do would help, but what i'd really like to see is a command list be able to communicate with the driver serially, so actual useful things like TEC target temperatures could be read and controlled, as well as most likely, diode current.

yes it would be real nice to utilize the TEC controller on the driver board but I dont think that will ever happen. What im talking about is the circuit board that powers the driver board. I'm assuming all it is, is an AC/DC Converter. It has a single pot in the corner and 3 positive and 3 negative terminals. What volts and at what current will this thing handle. I dont think it matters but I have the v4 driver board.

Oh. if you mean the side the mains plug in, it's just a fairly typical switching power supply. Most likely it outputs 12v or possibly 12v and 5v. I'll look tonight when I get home. That's easy to find out.

And people have had limit success talking to the drivers on these, but not to the point of being able to control or tune them in any useful way. I've seen a thread about it before. Not sure if it's here or over on PL.

*edit*

Yeah there was a thread on PL about it but again, no one ever managed to do anything useful with controlling the driver via software.

http://www.photonlexicon.com/forums/showthread.php/11161-BWB-10-OEM-473nm-laser-module-info-thread

OK i messed with it today and I was able to figure out that the pot adjusts the voltage from 4.5v-6v. What I dont know how to figure out is how much current this thing can do.

Are you just wanting it to power something else? Keep in mind the open frame power supply is just a CV supply. It's in no way made to run a diode. According to the stickers on all mine they output 5V@8A. Not sure what your trying to accomplish but the multi layer board with the LED's and the two DB9 connectors with the transistors screwed to the black heatsink is what drives the pump diode.. along with the TECs, etc. All the other power supply does is supply 5V to the driver, since it runs off 5V DC.. not 110v AC.

Though pretty much every 'stand alone brick open frame switching power supply' made has output stickers on them. Generally the stickers are either on the big filter caps (like they are on these) or on the side of one of the heatsinks.

Yeah im wanting to run a flexmod p3 and 4 LPC 826's with it. wondering if its suitable for the job.

*EDIT* ok now i see the sticker on the cap.

Ah. Well if your running them in parallel, a 5V supply should work fine on the P3. You'd probably need to feed it at least 12V to run them in series though.

Hey, so I got one of those "defective" ones, and the one I have apparently is only defective in the mode. So good deal.

But, it's only reading a couple of milliwatts, if that. What was the lens that you said should be taken off? The pickoff lens? Where is it?

Also - is it bad that I turned the pot on my PSU by a couple of turns? What would that do?

Further... it doesn't seem to want to change in strength when I change the pot. Oh, and the green LED never turns off.

HALP!

Which 'the' pot are you talking about? If it's a v4 driver, it'll have 3, if it's a v5 driver, it'll have 5 or 6 pots.. I don't remember without taking one of those apart again.

You have to separate the two board layer on the driver to get to the pots that actually do anything. And you really need to wire it up so it'll run with them separated, otherwise your just 'adjusting blindly'

If you mean the single pot on the mains Power supply that feeds the driver.. All that does is change the output that feeds the actual driver. If you messed with this, you really need to hook a DMM to the output of it and adjust it back to where it reads 5V. This power supply has nothing to do with the laser output.. It just converts mains voltage to 5v DC which the actual driver runs off of.

HMm. Alright, I have the V4. I will take a look at the mains power supply so I can get it back to 5V (not sure what it's at now...).

And regarding "the" pot, I adjusted the W2. I set W3 so the delay is very little (annoying), and W1 I set to middle for six turns. Right now, they aren't even getting a reading off of my DMM with W1 and W2 both 6 turns.

EDIT: So I adjusted the PS pot and got it up to 5V, now it's outputting around 2-3mW of power. Good so far. Now just to get it up to par.

EDIT AGAIN: Well, it seems like it almost always needs a decent amount of "heatup" time" which is kind of annoying. I turned it off, played with W2 a little (turned it up but then turned it back down because I was unsure of how much I had turned it). Do you recommend I play with W2/W1?

Um. DPSS != diode lasers. Pretty much all CNI heads (which the actual laser heads on these are) are spec'd after 15 minute warmups. They aren't 'instant on' devices. 'Good' DPSS lasers will behave exactly the opposite of the cheap chinese ones your likely used to. Good DPSS lasers hardly ever 'peak' on initial turn on the fall off in power. Good DPSS lasers are tuned to run at a stable power after reaching the correct operating temperature.. Not tuned to give a short high power burst, then the power quickly drop off as the temperature ramps up.. which is how most cheap pointers behave.

If your talking about the startup delay, it's a safety feature, coupled with giving the TEC's inside the head a chance to reach correct temperatures before pump power is applied. And to my knowledge, none of the pots effect this. It's done in software. With the v4 driver, there's really on one pot that has any noticeable effect on anything, and I believe that's labeled w2.

You did make a harness so you can run the laser with the two halves of the driver split, but still connected right? Your only likely to make it worse by just randomly turning pots without the laser being on so you can watch the output on a LPM.