Spyder II GX

Yeah but it would be a bit bigger I'm sure. So not interested in having me test your brothers laser eh?

Well I would have to ask him first. He also wanted my to ship it to him this week.

A laser that power drop after 10seconds to half power great thing

Murudai said:

Oh, now I see the beam shots. Damn that slideshow is confusing. What's wrong with the laser label anyway? The standard has and always has been red for the beam on the label, regardless of laser output colour.

Oh, and here's something I never noticed before. The tripod part of the Wicked Stand is EXACTLY the same as this from DX: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.1307. Then you couple it with this: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.14150 to get something that won't scratch up your laser, and you've got a better option for less than 10% of the price   It's the setup I have, and it works great

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Cool I have that too!

Kenom said:

TEC is thermo electric cooler. or a peltier.  it's an electrical device that generated extremely cold temperatures on one side and draws the heat to the other side (which needs to be heatsinked to draw that heat away)  It claims to have "The Spyder II™ GX laser is designed to operate under the most demanding of conditions, and is the first portable laser equipped with thermoelectric cooling." quoted from wicked lasers website.

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That output graph is quite unstable for ANY air cooled laser let alone a TEC stabilized one! I have to wonder if they even have a TE cooler in that thing. Either that or its controller is horribly designed/programmed. The neat thing about TE's is they can heat and cool just by changing polarity. That works great with a DPSS as cold KTP can be warmed at startup and as the mounts heat up the controller reduces the current, crosses zero and changes polarity cooling down the KTP! This ensures maximum stability always. If you've had the pleasure to work on/use a Coherent Compass you'd see this kind of stability in action! Near ruler flat output and after the warmup time it's flat and I mean flat.

Back on topic, that graph is disturbing especially since the period covered is only 1/2 minute! The initial output peak is nice but not of much use in the real world where the laser needs to be on for minutes at a time. I'd love to see a plot of switching it on until the batt dies!

The spyder does indeed have a TEC inside it, and it produces a lot of heat. The Spyder II BX I was able to look at got uncomfortably warm after about 30 seconds of continuous use. Stability was also garbage like this one - it would jump all over the place although only averaging about 10mW

MarioMaster said:

The spyder does indeed have a TEC inside it, and it produces a lot of heat. The Spyder II BX I was able to look at got uncomfortably warm after about 30 seconds of continuous use. Stability was also garbage like this one - it would jump all over the place although only averaging about 10mW

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I saw this one on ebay a wile back. Was that you?

MarioMaster said:

The spyder does indeed have a TEC inside it, and it produces a lot of heat. The Spyder II BX I was able to look at got uncomfortably warm after about 30 seconds of continuous use. Stability was also garbage like this one - it would jump all over the place although only averaging about 10mW

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A TE's hot side MUST be kept sufficiently cool or a runaway condition will develop that can make the cooled side get very hot as well. I'd be curious to see what kind of control they have. (probably a resistor hehe)

Woah, that power graph is terrible! A laser with "100% duty cycle" should NOT drop in power by that much over a few seconds... This is a 30 second test, wheras a true 100% duty cycle laser like the Hercules is tested for 20 minutes. I wonder what the next 19.5 minutes of this graph would look like?

Sorry man, I know that you may be happy with this laser but that graph speaks for itself. A 30 second power average doesn't mean anything on a laser that is supposed to be TE cooled with 100% duty cycle. This graph should be at least 5 minutes long.

I'm guessing that the TE cooling use battery power right?  And the indicator was saying low battery.  Could there be a power issue preventing the cooling from operating?  Or maybe the unit is defective all together?  :-?

Nice review btw, interesting different approach... [smiley=thumbsup.gif]

You know this Spyder II graph reminds me of this commercial.


(This is a video taken over at wicked lasers when the test results of the new spyder II series were released)

Take a look...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN6gj3cTiJs

Now that's just stable,