"flashlight" laser lens??

mot of the information on lenses is geared towards making a tiny spot, for burning stuff, or making a cool laser beam at night...

I have ben seeing "flashlight" lasers around... but they are expensive...

I just thought it would be "neat" to have a little "flashlight" that had an adjustable beam size (spot-ish... up to, i dont know, a coupel of degrees cone would be good)

I have been seeing them in green (the commercial ones), but really, red would be kinda cool too.

i CANT be the only guy here, that ever wanted to make a "flashlight laser" since they sell the dang things... when i think about it, it just seems a matter of getting a host module that has the "proper" lens...

most "specs" will brag up how TIGHT their lens can take the beam down... no one really "brags" that they can go up to a couple degrees spread...

what on a lens would indicate it had this ability?

(I figured if i went "uncoated" glass... when i built a different color one next time, it would just be a matter of picking a different driver)

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is there a particular "generic" module host, that one could use for this?
(i usually think in terms of to-18)
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i mean, how COOL would it be, to have a little green or red flashlight... and you can POINT up on the hill across the river, at what you are talking about...lol

Laser light isn't very good at direct lighting an ambient. The light is monochromatic/coherent and one of these characteristics (dunno what?) makes the ambient looks lighted with some "sandy" light.
Its hard to explain. Just remove the lens from some laser (carefully; beware with the insides) and try it.

The emitter size is so small that if you point to someone eyes in darkness, it will easily flash the person.

Any aixiz module with lens could expand and reduce the focus length... if its what you mean't... :thinking:

Homemade laser flashlight = Bad idea imo.

Anyways, for long range illuminating, it can make something pretty visible.

Simply remove the lens from your laser and there you have it, laser flashlight.

Lo and behold how bad of an idea it is. You still can't see much sh*t, but now you tumble in the dark in style.

Monochromatic light makes a terrible visible illumination tool. Your eyes just aren't that good friends with environment lit in that way.

You'd see better in the dark eating carrots than using a laser as a flashlight

A concave lens will do the job, as well as just removing the collimating lens... although it works decently well for red lasers if you're an astronomer :beer:

You can use some kind of fluorescent material and a 405/445nm laser. It will fluoresce and give out light, useable for lighting an ambient.
Its not a flashlight, tho. Its more like a "torch" than a flashlight.

WL has one of those... for a good $80. The "PhosForce", with a claimed 500 lumen max output

hwang21 said:

WL has one of those... for a good $80. The "PhosForce", with a claimed 500 lumen max output

Click to expand...

Yeah, in the meantime proven to be an absolute crap. If the Arctic did do a full 1W of output (which it doesn't) and if the phosphorus in that adapter had 100% conversion rate (which it obviously don't), it'd make 1W of white light.

That isn't a whole lot of light. WF-501B flashlights I take apart to make lasers into cost $9 on DX and output at around 3 Watts of white light, which makes a fine flashlight, but not fine enough to keep over a laser.

And they want to take a laser, and turn it into one third of what I take apart to make a laser out of.

Really, just, let that sink in for a minute.

It almost made sense until you see that the beam is spread out with a diffraction grating to cover a majority of the phosphor, rather than being focused to a small spot to create a high luminance white spot to image with the reflector.

Also, generally speaking, a 3W LED means it takes in 3W of electrical power. Some LEDs may very well put out the equivalent of 3W of optical power, though.

If you have a three element lens you can turn the lens around backwards and it makes a perfect circular output which you can adjust for throw or flood.:beer:

I used mine as makeshift flashlight.. don't defocus the beam.. just point at a light object such as a white brick wall or a soffit. that would reflect plenty of light..I've use all different colors.. green is best.