What do you use your laser for?

GoolGaul said:

my friends and I once (accidentally) smoked half a grasshopper... We were hanging out on a construction site at night, and didn;t notice that there was a dead bug in our bag of bud.

it crackled and popped like a seed would, so we really thought nothing of it, but later as we parted ways, and parted the remainder of the bag, we noticed the half-grasshopper in there and realized that we smoked the other half.

my friend's GF threw up immediately upon hearing "yep, we sure did smoke that grasshopper"...

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Well, I LOL'ed

think it was Konabug?...

Guyfromhe said:

You don't need to be a jerk about it. I was legitimately curious and I figured since your in the business you would know. If you don't that's fine.

I could have deduced that you would use a lab quality meter for your first one on my own that's not what I was getting at.

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In terms of electromagnetism, one watt is the rate at which work is done when one ampere (A) of current flows through an electrical potential difference of one volt (V).

Therefore calibrating the first meter was done without a laser. Another laser power meter would therefore be calibrated to the original meters settings in order to display the same power output when a laser is being metered.

Similarly, you could ask how was the first ever 1 meter distance measured.

And the answer is that is wasn't measured. The length of 1 meter is an arbitrary decision made by scientists or whoever made it, and from then on, all distances were calibrated to the original 1 meter.

snoutke said:

Similarly, you could ask how was the first ever 1 meter distance measured.

And the answer is that is wasn't measured. The length of 1 meter is an arbitrary decision made by scientists or whoever made it, and from then on, all distances were calibrated to the original 1 meter.

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Correct! Did you know there is a 1 meter bar of metal, kept somewhere in the UK (IIRC) under certain conditions and that has been the standard 1 meter length since the 1880's. Pretty cool stuff! op:

To get this back on topic... scientists now use special equipment to measure the wavelength of light and 1 meter distance is determined by the length of the wave peaks. For example at 405nm, it may take 600 million wave peaks to pass through a point for a total distance of 1 meter to be observed (totally made up, but you get the picture).

To add to the uses, I found that my 1W 445 slightly defocused works great for heating Black, Red, Blue, and Green heat shrink tubing and is especially useful when trying to heatshrink right up against the LD and I also use to make reference holes for drilling and mounting in black plastic enclosures.

Kmor2004 said:

To add to the uses, I found that my 1W 445 slightly defocused works great for heating Black, Red, Blue, and Green heat shrink tubing and is especially useful when trying to heatshrink right up against the LD and I also use to make reference holes for drilling and mounting in black plastic enclosures.

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Wow you might have given me a reason err.... excuse to get a 1W 445

Back in the mid-18th century, the French were creating the metric system, and there were two choices to use as the standard...

1) the length of a pendulum, whose period was one second - but subject to changes in earth's gravity at differing altitudes (which I think has been proven incorrect?)
2) one ten-millionth (1/10,000,000th) of the distance from earth's equator to the north pole (or consequently, the south pole).

They went with #2. and thus most European countries have an identical METER BAR...

I'll betcha a dollar that they're not identical...
and I'll betcha 10 dollars that NONE of the are actually correct.