Need an opinion

Hi,
You have to ask lazereer What boost will be ok with that high power. That diode is capable for 4 and 5 W's +. Email him and see if he can set you up with your needs. It's a great diode make sure about your parameters fist.

Rich

Boost driver, buck driver, it doesn't matter so much and you can switch the laser on and off willy nilly with no problem. Only thing is, with a boost driver the current drawn from the battery is more than if using two batteries in series and for higher power diodes, a single battery will run down far faster.

some awesome opinions in this thread, my personal favorite is the m462! I just built one in a awesome looking wicked laser replica host.. Here's a thread I did on it. I'll be adding some more pictures tomorrow. http://laserpointerforums.com/f40/new-462-build-added-pics-95496.html <--- link

Laser Chick said:

^^ Very good info Benm. I have ran into that before.
Also with car jumper wires. The cables looked heavy/thick but the copper gauge itself was small!

Click to expand...

Hope it helps in the future, i was quite surprised to figure it out at some point.

I got these wires with 2 croc clips on them for $2 for 10 leads or so, which are fine for transferring or analyzing logic level signals. At some point i used them for the battery connections (both negative and positive) for a 445 laser running from 2 lithium cells, and it did not get up to full power. Initially i thought the cells were depleted or there was something wrong with the driver circuit.

Once i measured the voltage drop across those wires it was instantly clear that these where actually limiting the current due to their resistance so the driver had no chance of regulating anything.

And this was just a simple 445 nm laser from a projector running at 1 amp.

With higher currents this problem increases - be very suspect of any wire if you run them at several amps, and just measure the voltage drop across the wires. Plastic is a lot cheaper than copper, which seems to be clear to all chinese manufacturers.

And as far as all those mostly plastic, little copper, starter wire kits: they work by charging the battery in the stuck car from the good one. There is no way you could turn the starter over by power supplied by those tiny leads alone.