Man, I'm out of the laser game for a year or so, and suddenly I'm reading about direct, non-DPSS green laser diodes? When did this happen, and do they suck?
Also, there's this: [URL="http://gizmodo.com/5916842/the-only-thing-cooler-than-a-laser-is-an-x+ray-laser"/URL]
Sigh. And here comes the huffiness. Nobody believes that this is about your "friend", because your friend could have posted the question as easily as you did (though I suppose if I were to give you the benefit of the doubt, you might have posted this because your friend doesn't speak English)...
--** A Public Service Announcement from Dvorhagen **--
This happened to me a couple nights ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3T43DKFsS7o
If you really must ignite something explosive with a laser, make sure your battery isn't low. At full charge, my 445nm would have been able to light this...
There is a lot of good, easy to understand information here - you just have to do a little reading. Try the search field at the top of the page. People around here get annoyed if you ask very basic questions that you could easily answer with a little research on the forum.
You can also try this...
Ya - and there's a noticeable lag with such things, even at 30 fps. Not to mention that it sort of sucks not to have stereo vision when you're trying to hit something at the focal point of a laser beam.
When it comes down to it, I think a practical video system just wouldn't be economical...
HM -- 10"!? :( Well, it'll still be a rush to get multiple watts of IR out of anything, even if It's close-up. It's all about experimentation, right? I'll probably eventually have to invest in a CO2 tube and some fancy optics if I really want to do something long-range..
That power module looks...
Heheh - goggles, cardboard, and an iPhone, and you're all set! Thanks for the nod, TWight!
Seriously, Bionic-Badger's right. I only built those things because at the time I had no goggles and I wanted to play with lasers without searing my retinas. The bloom when using any sort of CCD-based...
Actually, HMike, your Star Wars CO2 build was my inspiration! I was hoping to construct something along those lines. But, like you said, the more I read about it, the more difficult it's looking to focus the output (which, I'm sure, is painfully multimodal).
Kenom mentioned...
For my most ambitious (stupid?) project to date, I just bought a 12W IR diode from ebay:
http://www.coherent.com/downloads/FAP800series_DSFinal.pdf
It looks like it's a fiber-coupled array of 808nm diodes.
I want to make something very burny, maybe stick a 4x beam expander in front of it...
These newfangled 445nm diodes have forced me and my wallet to come out of seclusion and slap together a new laser. Wow, this thing is bright. It puts my sad little ~200mW LPC to shame. I actually accidentally *burned* my hand with this thing. Seriously - it's blistered and everything. Here are...