Rectangular, 12-pin cans?

Okay... so I just won an auction on eBay for four "as-is" 18x burners for $10... great deal, or so I thought...

I got them today and was surprised to find it's really six 16x burners - Aopen DUW1608's.
I opened one of them up while I was bored at work today and found to my dismay they use some kind of odd 12 pin, rectangular diodes... does anyone know how these work?

I'll try to take some pictures tonight, but they're like 7mm x 4mm, rounded rectangles, with TWELVE pins on the bottom and some sort of glass optics cubes mounted to the tops of the cans. The glass is coated on the top surface, and there is a small circle at the top of each which has a different coating (looks like it's split into quarters, each quarter shines differently in the light)... both the IR and the red can both look like this, one is labeled DKgr3 and the other is labeled SAhy3 (the 3's look like backwards E's)

I'm beginning to think these may be useless, looking at the traces on the pcb, it seems all the pins are used for *something*...

Has anyone encountered these before and perhaps knows how to hook them up?

Thanks!

here's a crude sketch of the pin layout, I'll post some pics when I get home..

one pin is clearly connected to the can itself and is likely gnd, but the 11 other pins are isolated, and have individual lines going to them, they are all connected to something.

in the space in the middle, there is a flexible pcb ribbon cable thing, and there's what looks like two smd resistors attaching two pins.
the largest traces on the board go to the two side pins, so I'm thinking they may be the voltage, but who knows really?

yay! they're not useless!

Okay... so I'm really bored at work and I was anxious to try to get *something* out of these cans.. so I wrapped two AA batteries together with rubber bands and paper clips, and tried blindly sticking wires to pins... and sure enough the two pins on the sides provided me with a satisfying, blinding wash of monochromatic red light across my desk... makes me wonder what the other 10 pins are for. (yes, I know I may have damaged the diode by using no driver, connecting and disconnecting current repeatedly, etc, but I'm not too concerned, I have another five of these.)

I still have no idea how I'll be mounting these or providing focusing optics for them, but it seems they require no special circuit to get them to laze.. (phew!)

For anyone else who gets these cans, the one labeled "SAhy3" is the red, the pin on the left side of my drawing is + and the can itself is gnd.

Those are some strange diodes Will be kinda hard to mount them in modules, but at $10 I think it's a super sweet deal(I would actually be happy to take 2 of those of your hands if I had any money ).You could've used an ohmmeter to see which way current flows : But I'm sure you didn't do much damage to it since it's still working.

all of those other pins are used for a photosensor that is physically built inside the can. I've got some nice macro shots I'll see if I can dig up. In the macro shot you can see the bar is mounted in the center and the photosensor is off to the left. little microchip lookin thingy. there's lots of little micro wires running to it. as far as it's function? I've no clue really. I can guess that's it's related to feedback of laser power but really no way to know.


By kenkassdy at 2007-10-09


By kenkassdy, shot with CYBERSHOT at 2007-10-09


By kenkassdy at 2007-10-09

You can see from the top picture I did find a means of mounting it in a module but it wasn't very effective. it was off center so the beam profile sucked and I fried it pretty quickly cause there wasn't enough thermal transfer.

Fantastic info!

Thanks Kenom!

I'm thinking I may just leave it in its current heatsink (maybe solder some scrap metal to it to be safe), and see if there's a way to mount a lens in front of it.. I imagine the optical glass cube thingie is pretty much useless and I can just break it off, right?

I've gone and played around with the diode a bit more and was able to get some smoke happening when I held the drive's original lens in front of it... it has a focal length of less than a cm and it's really messy, hardly a focused point... but these are indeed capable of burning!

On a side note, I noticed one of the drives I got is actually an 18x, and I'm relieved to find that it has a regular, cylindrical 5mm can... the model num of that one is DSW1812P, in case anyone comes across one.

If you cant get it in an aixiz module just put a regular magnifying glass in front of it, it will allow it to focus down and burn stuff, just cant really be used for pointing.

...lazer.... ;D ;D ;D

these were pretty much worthless as far as I was concerned. the output power I did experience with them was not what I'd say incredible or impressive. Now granted it was only off 2 weak AAA's so it should be held against it but when I had those hooked up in comparison to the stonetek diodes it just didn't match capabilities. too much light bouncin round that huge can. On the other side. these make great diodes for testing current on a driver. who cares if it gets toasted.

Rectangular cans - pics, and a surprise!

Pics, as promised...

Here's what the cans look like when they're first harvested... as you can see they're bristling with pins and have a strange glass cube on top.


Here's one all cleaned up... they look kinda sexy, but too bad I can't think of a way to mount them easily.


I was sorta disappointed overall, until I took apart the 18x one, where I got a pleasant surprise...

...it looks to be similar to the infamous 300mW pioneer diodes, housed in an ugly, impenetrable heatsink... this should be fun to try and extract...

I think the diode in the heatsink is a short open can, the pioneer diodes are long open cans. Wait a bit before you start messing with it. I sent a short open can diode I had to Dr. Lava for testing a few days ago. So wait a bit until he receives it and he tests it so we can find out a good current to drive these at, I think they might be weaker than the long open can diodes. But who knows? :

chido: you're right... I went and shelled the diode and sure enough it looks to be the short open can that's floating around....


since this was from an Aopen burner and the other short open cans were from a Sony(?) drive, what do you figure the chances are this is the exact same diode?

Either way, I won't be playing with it until I get some kind of driver for it... I'm waiting on modules from DX, lenses from aixiz, and drivers from BlueFusion... could be a while yet.

Glad I bothered to search before posting because this gives me enough pin out to work with. I harvested one of these 12 pin rectangular diodes from a CD-RW drive and I've been scared to try it without decent info on the internal workings of these.

use the big pins on the outside. This diode simplifies the sled and optics design. It's a specialty diode meant for optical drives only. Instead of a cube to split the beam and reflect the return signal to the photosensor, it has some funky holographic cube thing that redirects the returning beam off to the side, where the sensor is.

Found it in an AOpen drive as well, although in a much cheaper CD burner.

Well the one I had turned out to be infrared and my brother burnt it out. The good news is while cleaning out some old boxes I found another sled with a similar diode in it.