Recent content by blasterman

Find a long stretch of road out in the country with a friend, park your laser (and friend) in one spot, and drive the distance you want to emulate as aircraft altitude. Have your friend shine the laser at your car. That right there will give you a pretty close idea of what the laser will look...

When you try to educate your parents that lasers are 'coherent light', does your dad reply back "that means it talks, right?" If so, we feel your pain :-)

looks like he took a long exposure of the glass (small aperture setting) in a black room, and hit the glass from different angles with a red green and blue. Should be easily to replicate if some of our other members want to give it a shot.

I have a 465 running at 3 watts and a 520 at 1 watt running in side by side laser projectors. The 520 doesn't really show off it's superior brightness until I start pumping up the fog machines and get something in the sir. Then the 520 starts walking over the 465. At that point the 520 is...

The link I gave is to a site that sells versions with 100mW greens and higher powered blues. I simply can't find anything remarkeable about the common 30mW green versions other than every other cheap bar in North America uses them as disco lights. I often see them in nurseries projecting on the...

I'm seeing a lot of commercials for these as an alternative to incan / LED exterior holiday lights. IMO, the laser diffractors aren't a match for a proper 'Clark Griswald' lighting job, but IMO, they might work under the right conditions. Those conditions being, (1) you have a white house, (2)...

Define 'lab laser'. There's lab lasers sold on Ebay from Chinese sites...99.99% are nothing but the same diodes we use in laser pointers, but with cheap heat sink and rather spartan power supply. Then there's 'lab lasers' sold by Edmund Scientific and others in the class which cost thousands...

I think the first thing I'd ask somebody getting back into lasers after being absent for a few years is why 445-450? The 462's and especially the 520's require significantly less energy to produce the same brightness levels. So unless you need ~6 watts of output to set things on fire, or have...

Was involved in serious astronomy years ago. A 30mw common 532 green won't affect night vision. Not even close. The problem is you won't find a green with a clickable off/on switch. At least I never did. 445 blues just consume 10x the power to get the same brightness levels. I would look for a...

I was about ready to make the same experiment, but it seems you already proved my theory. Just curious, but how far is the surface of the lens from diode? My suspicion is the larger lens area is grabbing a much bigger chunk of the emitter area, and the results are obvious downstream with more...

Given the answers to several of your questions are contained in my immediate post and profile I'm not going to re-hash because it's a waste of time. This is the exact same problem I run into over at PhotonLexicon.

I know this topic has been asked quite a bit, but the answers always seem to only offer hints of a solution and never the whole picture. I also don't care for the 'tone' over over at PhotonLexicon. I want to build / buy a basic galvo driven 3D laser unit for basic tinkering. I already have gobs...

Yes and no. This is a common servo / stepper type chinese laser that are the most common of all the cheaper projectors. Technically they aren't legal because there's no way they come with an operational variance, so lets get that out of the way. Are Ninja's from the FDA going to drop out of the...

I have both running in DJ projectors next to each other with the 465 run a little below normal (3amps - thanks DTR) because it's constant duty. There is a subtle but obvious difference in color with the 465 being more of a 'windex' looking color. That's the term in the LED field we use to...

Looks like something Roger Goodell just implemented to verify QB's are using properly inflated footballs.