lasers with high/low settings?

Electronically this is fairly easy to accomplish, I think the reason we don't see it being used is that it is quite another matter to mount the needed control - either a switch or pot - in a flashlight style host.

I have made box lasers for both red and bluray diodes that have a continuously variable output . It makes things a lot easier for performing experiments!

i tried soldering a tiny switch inside of my dilda lazor to two different sets of resistors.

in the process the "low" power resistor died or something... and i gave up untill i find the materials to do it right.

I think I am right in thinking that the switch needs to be a "make before break" type to prevent an open circuit when flicking the switch....(it will switch in all of the resistors momentarily)

Regards rog8811

Xplorer877 said:

Here you go:

Gotta love MS paint ;D

Click to expand...

I usually use resistors to make my MAX power setting then put a 25 ohm pot in there.

--hydro15

Xplorer877 said:

Here you go:

Gotta love MS paint ;D

Click to expand...

That's a pretty creative use of Paint! Can't go wrong with actual pictures of components..

I modified it slightly to show another possible way of doing it so you would only need a simple On/Off switch,
and it would add the "low ohm" resistance in parallel to the "high ohm" ones for higher power. This would have the advantage of sharing the total power dissipation across all the resistors in the high power setting.

The values would have to be adjusted accordingly

This would have the advantage of sharing the total power dissipation across all the resistors in the high power setting.

Click to expand...

....and you won't need a make before break switch good thinking kage.

Regards rog8811

I took one of my company's flashlight which puts out LED UV, <1mw red laser, and LED flashlight. Removed the UV LED, and the laser and placed in my bluray diode. Now it's a flash light and a pretty bright violet laser. wanted to use the original laser power, but didn't have enough juice to power up my violet laser. Had to hook it to the UV port and remove the UV LEDs. Any case when I was working on it, I found out it was using a AVR microcontroller to allow you to press a micro switch to select the output. It's pretty cool.