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It's embarrassing to admit, but I'd never actually handled a higher powered laser before... I may talk like I know a lot about electronics and lasers, but it's all been theory till recently, when I decided I'd just throw together whatever parts I had laying around with no concern about killing the diode.
I got a bunch of 16x burners that had these unusual rectangular diodes (discussed here.. some pics of them here), which prove near impossible to mount in any sort of reasonable housing... so I wasn't really concerned about killing it.
I soldered it to a penny as a way of heatsinking it, since it was getting really hot on its own... At first I really didn't care and I just drove it directly off batteries for a while, then in an effort to prolong its life I decided to solder some random parts in there.. I grabbed the lowest value resistor in my parts bin (10ohm) which proved to be too high and I ended up shorting it, along with a 10uf 25v capacitor.. why 10uf? because it was right next to the pushbutton I was salvaging and I decided what the hey.
I started off by gluing the dvd burner's original lens to the front of the diode, which wasn't very good... it was full of artifacts and had a fixed focal point of about an inch away from the lens... eventually I glued an aixiz lens to a rod and mounted that in place.. worked a lot better and gave me a way of focusing it.
I got a good deal of fun out of this diode before I killed it... I'd say I used it for about 3-4 hours or so, cumulatively... I smoked some floppies, I managed to put a nice hole in my mousepad, and I lit a bunch of matches.. (for some reason it would light blackened matches instantly, but could not light an unmodified match.. (maybe just the color of red in the matches was the same wavelength as the laser or something)).
Here's a beamshot:
(my room's not really that dark, the exposure on my camera just sucks.)
(here's another, better exposure, showing closer to the actual ambient light in my room)
I also played around with a "time tunnel", sticking a tiny mirror from the burner onto a spare cpu fan I had laying around... I left this on for at least half an hour, and nether the diode or the penny got so much as warm... I'm considering using pennies for heatsinks more often... they're solid copper (or at least the older ones are), and hey, they're cheap!
It eventually stopped lasing once the batteries fell to about 2.2v... thinking maybe I'd killed the diode, I tried it with an AC adapter to check... sure enough it was still alive, and put out one last burst of red before the dirty power from the adapter killed it.
All in all, it was a fun distraction for a while.. I hope this inspires someone to throw caution to the wind once in a while and just *do* it... Life is too short to be overly cautious all the time, and sometimes it's worth losing a few bucks to learn from your mistakes.
(of course, I mean in terms of wasting money and killing diodes... as far as laser safety goes, you can never be too careful with your eyes.)
I got a bunch of 16x burners that had these unusual rectangular diodes (discussed here.. some pics of them here), which prove near impossible to mount in any sort of reasonable housing... so I wasn't really concerned about killing it.
I soldered it to a penny as a way of heatsinking it, since it was getting really hot on its own... At first I really didn't care and I just drove it directly off batteries for a while, then in an effort to prolong its life I decided to solder some random parts in there.. I grabbed the lowest value resistor in my parts bin (10ohm) which proved to be too high and I ended up shorting it, along with a 10uf 25v capacitor.. why 10uf? because it was right next to the pushbutton I was salvaging and I decided what the hey.
I started off by gluing the dvd burner's original lens to the front of the diode, which wasn't very good... it was full of artifacts and had a fixed focal point of about an inch away from the lens... eventually I glued an aixiz lens to a rod and mounted that in place.. worked a lot better and gave me a way of focusing it.
I got a good deal of fun out of this diode before I killed it... I'd say I used it for about 3-4 hours or so, cumulatively... I smoked some floppies, I managed to put a nice hole in my mousepad, and I lit a bunch of matches.. (for some reason it would light blackened matches instantly, but could not light an unmodified match.. (maybe just the color of red in the matches was the same wavelength as the laser or something)).
Here's a beamshot:
(my room's not really that dark, the exposure on my camera just sucks.)
(here's another, better exposure, showing closer to the actual ambient light in my room)
I also played around with a "time tunnel", sticking a tiny mirror from the burner onto a spare cpu fan I had laying around... I left this on for at least half an hour, and nether the diode or the penny got so much as warm... I'm considering using pennies for heatsinks more often... they're solid copper (or at least the older ones are), and hey, they're cheap!
It eventually stopped lasing once the batteries fell to about 2.2v... thinking maybe I'd killed the diode, I tried it with an AC adapter to check... sure enough it was still alive, and put out one last burst of red before the dirty power from the adapter killed it.
All in all, it was a fun distraction for a while.. I hope this inspires someone to throw caution to the wind once in a while and just *do* it... Life is too short to be overly cautious all the time, and sometimes it's worth losing a few bucks to learn from your mistakes.
(of course, I mean in terms of wasting money and killing diodes... as far as laser safety goes, you can never be too careful with your eyes.)