OK. I am sorry if this is covered somewhere else but I have looked and looked and cant find an answer anywhere. Maybe my search skills suck or something. I am waiting for some high powered diodes to arrive in the mail, but I had some DVD and DVD recorder drives that were lying around. So I started pulling them apart just so I could practice soldering and harvesting diodes, of course this is after I broke the pins of a PHR blu-ray diode.
Anyway, I got a diode from a 8x DVD Burner, The driver I built uses a 25 ohm potentiometer and one 10 ohm resistor, I built a test load to see what current it would be delivering to a red diode. The current delivered ranges from 34mA to 125mA. I soldered some wires to the diode placed in a aixiz housing, and put that in this heat sink (Class IIIb Green Laser Modules - > 5 mW for OEM Products, Research, Hobbies). The whole thing is hooked up to a 9v battery.
I maxed out the potentiometer and got a nice red beam capable of burning a whole in electrical tape, I didnt have anything else to try and light up (i.e. matches).
I had this on at 125ma for at least 15minutes and the heat sink didnt even get warm.
So my questions are:
At this current is it possible to estimate how much power the laser is delivering in terms of mW?
If I redesign the driver I can increase the current, how much higher should I go. What current would definetly be too much?
Most of the information that i found all dealt with 16x dvd burner diodes, anything I found on 8x dvd burners did not really help. Any help or insight would be appreciated.
Thanks
Anyway, I got a diode from a 8x DVD Burner, The driver I built uses a 25 ohm potentiometer and one 10 ohm resistor, I built a test load to see what current it would be delivering to a red diode. The current delivered ranges from 34mA to 125mA. I soldered some wires to the diode placed in a aixiz housing, and put that in this heat sink (Class IIIb Green Laser Modules - > 5 mW for OEM Products, Research, Hobbies). The whole thing is hooked up to a 9v battery.
I maxed out the potentiometer and got a nice red beam capable of burning a whole in electrical tape, I didnt have anything else to try and light up (i.e. matches).
I had this on at 125ma for at least 15minutes and the heat sink didnt even get warm.
So my questions are:
At this current is it possible to estimate how much power the laser is delivering in terms of mW?
If I redesign the driver I can increase the current, how much higher should I go. What current would definetly be too much?
Most of the information that i found all dealt with 16x dvd burner diodes, anything I found on 8x dvd burners did not really help. Any help or insight would be appreciated.
Thanks
