Party project with lasers, concerns about most adequate lasers to use

Hello everyone,

I am pretty new in this forum, and although I have been reading posts for a time, I hadn't the opportunity to post anything that would be worth.

I am making a project for a party which involves around 200 people wearing lasers inserted in clothes and controlled remotely.

We are interested in getting the maximum visibility from the beam in order to maximize the effect, and for that we are thinking about using green lasers and place some smoke machines around. It will be inside, for sure.

We will be probably using something like the True Green Laser Cheap True Green Laser Pen 5mW and take away the module.

Do you have any suggestion? If we want strong but safe visible beams (5mW), is the green good or should we go for another wavelength? And we will be giving protective glasses to everyone, for sure.

Any suggestion or idea would be great! And maybe there is somebody interested in helping with the project? We are based in London!

Well, for beam visibility protective glasses are not going to be your friend. If you have smoke and low ambient lights, then a < 5mw green beam will be plenty visible (unless you are wearing goggles) without posing too much eye damage risk. Green will certainly give the most visibility per watt of optical power.

Green is always the brightest-- 50mW of 532 is as 'bright'(by eye) as 1W OF BLUE=

3$ GREEN pointers will pretty much be too bright(sold as 5 mW ONLY to get around Greed-bay's rule of 'none allows listed over 5 mW'
Some pro true 5 mW cost >$140 each--

IMHO your proposed project may not be as good as you hoped for.
think about it-- IF all are wearing eye protection there will be very little seen by those there-

On paper(no pun intended), your idea may look to be awesome , but I doubt, TBH, you will get what you hoped for..

hak

Thank you very much for your answers!.

Its a bit sad to think it wont be as awesome as I would like, but for sure there is a way around! At least we can control the amount of light.

As I understand, these (not) true green lasers would look good, but protective glasses will make them almost invisible...

Are these 5mW green lasers so dangerous to use in that kind of environment? Would you recommend a mandatory use of the glasses?

Thanks again!

Javier

If you could find, and verify, that the lasers are no more than 5mW, it should be fine. The problem is finding such a low powered green, and affording it when you do. It's actually cheaper to make them >5mW so the truly <5mW pointers tend to be expensive.

ChaosLord said:

If you could find, and verify, that the lasers are no more than 5mW, it should be fine. The problem is finding such a low powered green, and affording it when you do. It's actually cheaper to make them >5mW so the truly <5mW pointers tend to be expensive.

Click to expand...

LaserGlow has some true <5mW 532nm pointers for pretty cheap, the cheapest model "the Anser" only runs for $40.

Link:Laserglow Technologies

-Alex

If I what I have been told is true---only a few 'places' China make ALL the pen pointers AND most are made from the SAME parts- THEN they USED to be binned and priced for sale- thus as some make a lot more mW than others--they DO NOT make 30mW or 50mW or 5 mW Its how they turn out-that sets the cost.. BUT now with no Greedbay sellers allowed to list pointers over 5mW they no longer bin them- so its a crap shoot every time buy 5 and no two may output the same amount..

weird thing is the fact real true 5mW 532s are often more spendy- I won a professional True green 5mW and found the makers price of $140--at the Casey Stack basic laser safety course at SELEM 2012- (60$ IIRC)

hak

If you are going to be removing the modules from the hosts anyway, most drivers have a potentiometer on them you could probably tweak to bring it down to 5mW. Since you're planning on controlling them remotely, I gather you have a bit of electronics design background, so alternatively design your own drivers for them (or buy a premade one from the forums, but check their lower current limits).