Finished 445 build

Finally got one of these all put together in a nice housing. I machined a block out of a scrap of solid aluminum stock and reamed it out so I could press in a diode housing I got from an ebay seller. This saved the hassle of drilling and tapping several difference sizes of precision threads and coming up with a good way to mount and center the diode. The forward section is reamed out .002 larger allowing the housing to be unscrewed in the event that access to the diode is ever needed. Lens is the Aixiz intended for blue.

Overall I'm quite pleased. Once focused it makes a nice beam with a lot of power, and the aluminum housing has enough thermal mass to run for at least an hour at 1.2A with no additional heatsinking. I may mill a heatsink to screw to the top but for now this is fine. Power supply is an external linear design with analog modulation. Still in the prototyping stage but I'll complete that as time allows.

Nicely machined labby! Do you have any internal pics? With access to machinery to achieve that you should be coming up with all kinds of cool stuff... Good job.

M

Thats a heck of a heat sink. You should turn that into a handheld I would be a bludgeoning weapon and a laser!

Looks good!

Thanks, no, sorry, no internal pics. There's really nothing internal to take pics of anyway as it's just a ready-made housing pressed into a hole bored through a block of aluminum. The only thing left to do is make a small cover plate for the back that I can mount a connector to. I need to fab a mount for the red diode and some adjustable mirror mounts and then I can complete my RGB projector project.

I've avoided making anything handheld that puts out more than a few tens of mW and even that makes me nervous. I know a lot of folks are building high powered pointers but it's just too easy for people to get careless, myself included. Back when a 1W laser meant a 6 foot long water cooled plasma tube and 3 phase power, it was impossible to forget the respect it required. When it's a handheld device that runs on batteries it's a little disarming. I can just see a visitor picking the thing up and using it as a cat toy or pointing it at people without realizing how dangerous it is.

james1095 said:

... I've avoided making anything handheld that puts out more than a few tens of mW and even that makes me nervous. I know a lot of folks are building high powered pointers but it's just too easy for people to get careless, myself included. Back when a 1W laser meant a 6 foot long water cooled plasma tube and 3 phase power, it was impossible to forget the respect it required. When it's a handheld device that runs on batteries it's a little disarming. I can just see a visitor picking the thing up and using it as a cat toy or pointing it at people without realizing how dangerous it is.

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Same here. Those good old times when a laser was closer to rocket science then your keychain. Too bad I missed most of that, but I still try to avoid pointers. Just my taste.