Welcome to Laser Pointer Forums - discuss green laser pointers, blue laser pointers, and all types of lasers

LPF Donation via Stripe | LPF Donation - Other Methods

Links below open in new window

ArcticMyst Security by Avery

Random thoughts

Joined
Jul 29, 2018
Messages
55
Points
8
As a new member so far my biggest gripe is when using the search function how many times I wind up with hits that seem to be too old to be helpful. I tried to get up to speed on safety glasses and often times was reading stuff from a thread that was started in 2010 and the last post was from 2015. I get it that some stuff about safety glasses does not change but other things does.

As an example I read posts about the glasses at Amazon (that you can find being tested on youtube and getting a sorta OK) as maybe not being safe because the manufacture changing the dye used to make them.

Bottom line is what a lot of folks wanting to start using a laser safely are looking for is a link to a place where they can buy something. I know about certified glasses that will be about $US150 or so to start as well as Survival Laser glasses that are probably the best bang for the buck entry level glasses. Not to mention the $US10 Amazon glasses that will probably work OK for most beginners. Problem is it took me way longer than it should have to figure this out. Not to mention I would love for more experienced guys to weigh in on this with any updates.

I also spent some time in the stickies and started reading threads there only to discover a lot of the posts were over five years old. Given that the advice to new members says don't revive dead threads it is not clear how to proceed.


Also looking for an answer to what I will call how Moore's Law applies to lasers. I feel comfortable with a lot of tec stuff and have to say in just about every area I know of there has been progress that seems to conform to Moore's Law. Maybe I am wrong about being concerned about seeing so much old information in what I thought was a fast changing area. So how much progress has been made in lasers in the last 18 months.
 





Joined
Sep 20, 2013
Messages
17,252
Points
113
The fact that this forum has been here for 11 years means in a search you will get some old threads. In time you will learn how to avoid threads that will not give you the information you are looking for. As for laser goggles, that hasn't changed in the past 11 years except for maybe where to buy them. Have you spent much time in your user CP? If so, you will see the ability to reach out to members to make friends with some. Once you have done this you can send a private message to a member and ask specific questions like where to buy the best laser goggles. You have not been here very long and you should try to be more patient in learning how everything works around here. No one learned it all in a short period of time. :yh:
 

Coonie

0
Joined
Jan 12, 2018
Messages
303
Points
43
That's a long time 11 years. Is there an anniversary planned? That would be nice
 
Joined
Sep 20, 2008
Messages
17,622
Points
113
As a new member so far my biggest gripe is when using the search function how many times I wind up with hits that seem to be too old to be helpful. I tried to get up to speed on safety glasses and often times was reading stuff from a thread that was started in 2010 and the last post was from 2015. I get it that some stuff about safety glasses does not change but other things does.

You did not say which Search Function you used....:thinking:
There are two Search functions here....
One is at the top of the pages under the [ Search ] tab.
The other and the better of the two is the Search Bar
at the bottom of the Forum pages.

Jerry
 
Joined
Jul 29, 2018
Messages
55
Points
8
SNIP

As for laser goggles, that hasn't changed in the past 11 years except for maybe where to buy them. Have you spent much time in your user CP? If so, you will see the ability to reach out to members to make friends with some. Once you have done this you can send a private message to a member and ask specific questions like where to buy the best laser goggles. You have not been here very long and you should try to be more patient in learning how everything works around here. No one learned it all in a short period of time. :yh:


In my OP I noted some stuff about goggles had not changed, the thing was I was looking for places to buy them, which you posted was one of the things that had changed. I also noted that I had read older threads about the possibility that some companies might have changed dyes used in goggles so older reviews might not be accurate; not to mention reading responses made later, but ones I still considered out of date since they were longer than the 18 months noted in Moore's Law. Not sure what 'user CP' is but if it is what comes when I click on my user name than I have been there; but I could be wrong about that. I have sent some PMs and am waiting for responses and have one "friend".

Another thing I would note is that I am a member of multiple forums that have members with a wide range of skill levels. Some have stickies about buying something. One example is the long range precision rifle forum where the stickie would say the post for a recommendation for a rifle would include 1. the price point you are willing to spend, 2. general distance you will be shooting like 100-500 yards or 500 -1,000 yards or greater than 1,000 yards, 3. will you be shooting paper, steel, or do you also wanna have the flexibility to hunt with the rifle as well. This is just for starters the list is about 20 items long. Same for some of the computer forums I belong to, but I would note all start off with the price point. All this is in the faq thread that is short and too the point, along with other threads with more detail that realistically most experienced forum members would not expect to be read by new members.


I also belong to a lockpicking thread which also has guidelines for asking what lockpick set should I buy. Keep in mind that there are also legal issues here (as far as I know there are no laws against owning lasers, at least in the US). One thing that might be of interest to the mods here is that the lockpicking forum has some closed section that are only accessible to members with a certain number of posts and agreement by the mods that they belong there. These restricted sections deal with things like destructively defeating locks, and other subjects that they wanna keep out of the hands of criminals.


What I am trying to get at is that the more I read here the more I run across things like someone necro reviving a thread and then a response saying 'don't necro revive a thread' or what are basically pi$$ing contests, and often times I have seen multiple deletions of these posts by mods. Maybe if there were what I will call new member areas where brief clear guidelines were posted (I get the feeling some of the older members expect new members to spend weeks literally reading the stickies before posting and when that does not happen some of these older members feel free to bash the new members) and there were also somewhat restricted areas where a certain level of knowledge, skill, and ability was expected the signal to noise ration of the whole site would improve.

I guess I just thought this place worked like the rest of the internet, but maybe not.
 
Last edited:
Joined
Sep 20, 2013
Messages
17,252
Points
113
I don't understand your using Moore's law to describe something other than transistor density in integrated circuits. It really doesn't carry over to other things and certainly isn't called by the same name if it would. It is also agreed that Moore's law will fail once the density reaches a point where the current will not allow any more doubling of the density of ICs.

I know I personally don't like finding an old threads brought back to life by some new member who thinks asking a question in an eight year old thread will get him an answer. To me, it is common courtesy. If you think about it, many people who were here eight years ago are no longer active members, so your chances are slim at best.

I think that since we are working with dangerous equipment here, it is natural for veterans to want new members to read the stickies on safety. It can save your or someone else's eye sight to do so. The other stickies are not as important to me. We see enough problems of people permanently damaging their eyesight so often that we really wish people would read these at least.
 
Last edited:

Gazen

0
Joined
Nov 13, 2017
Messages
511
Points
43
He's just referring to how quickly technology is progressing with a commonly known law.
 
Joined
Jul 29, 2018
Messages
55
Points
8
He's just referring to how quickly technology is progressing with a commonly known law.


I am not up to speed enough to know how much improvement there has been in laser tec recently. However my ROVs, quadcopters, hexcopters, and optics/thermal imagers on my rifles have definitely gotten better over the last 18 months. Not to mention the batteries that power them, along with smart charges for the batteries.


Maybe I mistakenly thought there had been similar improvements in lasers; but I would bet there are better batteries, even if they would not run a 10,000 laser.
 
Joined
Sep 20, 2013
Messages
17,252
Points
113
Actually, battery chemistry hasn't changed at all in the past two years. The newer batteries that have come out are chemically the same as they've been, but vaping has caused new sizes to be introduced. Moore's Law is a very specific one that has been around for decades and relates to the transistor density in integrated circuits, period. My best smart charger is the Opus BT-C3100 and has been around for three years or longer. There are newer chargers out, but this one does what you want any smart charger to do. Besides charging your batteries is will give you the specific capacity, the internal resistance, can revive older batteries by cycling them between charged and discharged up to three times without you having to watch and switch it between these cycles. I'm not personally into drones, but I'm sure there are bigger ones than there were two years ago, but not because the technology has improved. It is driven by marketing schemes.
 
Joined
Dec 11, 2014
Messages
929
Points
83
I am not up to speed enough to know how much improvement there has been in laser tec recently. However my ROVs, quadcopters, hexcopters, and optics/thermal imagers on my rifles have definitely gotten better over the last 18 months. Not to mention the batteries that power them, along with smart charges for the batteries.


Maybe I mistakenly thought there had been similar improvements in lasers; but I would bet there are better batteries, even if they would not run a 10,000 laser.

There have been several recent advances in laser technology, but you probably won't see them yourself any time soon. Lasers are not really a "consumer product" on their own, at best they get integrated into something else you buy. The laser hobby itself is quite a niche; lasers as a hobby are not nearly as popular as the other stuff you mentioned. Not even close.

There are really only 2 kinds of lasers hobbyists care about: diode and solid-state (although there are still some gas laser fanatics out there, myself included). Advances in these areas don't come from hobbyists tinkering around in their garage and starting up a company with a revolutionary idea that's open to everyone, they come from multi-billion dollar corporations investing in new technologies for a product or service. Anything new the hobby market sees is just lucky spill-over from this process. Sure, we'll occasionally get a cool new host design or someone will combine 100 diodes into one huge beam or something, but it's mostly all just a new take on old tech.

Unless you're a physicist or material scientist, there's absolutely no need to be up to date on the current state of laser technology (aside from general interest). If you absolutely insist on knowing what's "hot" in lasers, scientific journals are your best bet.
 
Joined
Apr 2, 2009
Messages
10,662
Points
113
"user CP''(control panel) is near the top on the far left side-- you can do and change things there/
also-the preferred search is at the bottom look for 'google'.... my slow ass dial-up ISP is so weak that I do not get to use that one from home.... its just not there!!

I got tons of help when I joined and continue to get help often. So feel free to PM me so I can do some 'payback' hak
 
Joined
Jul 29, 2018
Messages
55
Points
8
SNIP

I'm not personally into drones, but I'm sure there are bigger ones than there were two years ago, but not because the technology has improved. It is driven by marketing schemes.


If the truth be known improvement in UAVs (Unmanned Ariel Vehicles, which you seem to be confusing with drones) is going in the opposite direction; newer ones are getting smaller not bigger. DJI is the unquestioned leader and their Mavic and Spark series are much smaller than the older Inspires and Phantoms.

The two biggest areas of improvement have been in what is called FPV (First Person View) flying and obstacle avoidance.

I still have older systems which broadcasts a 480p video at unreliable frame rates over short distances maybe up to 1k at best, and realistically half of that or less. DJI brought out Lightbridge which was reliable up to five kilometers at a much more reliable frame rate with no ghosting at 1080p. The newer Lightbridge2 is even more reliable.


While older UAV initially had obstacle avoidance in one direction pointing down to make landing easier; later models added both downward and forward obstacle avoidance. Now DJI has introduced models with side obstacle avoidance added, and the newest have backwards as well. Not only has the number of directions increased but so has the size of obstacles detected been improved so now instead of just detecting walls and big branches small twigs are detected.


There has also been improvement in the size of google maps that can be loaded into the controller the pilot on the ground uses so the picture in picture on the screen shows not only the first person view of where the UAV is headed but a smaller window of the google map loaded in the controller.


While I am not sure of the reason flight times have easily doubled. I have older UAVs that boasted a 15-17 minute flight time which was considered the best available. Now it is easy to find UVAs that exceed a 30 minute flight time. Things like batteries and better component design are both factors, but I am not sure which is more important.


While kinda specific to guys like me companies like quadh2o have introduced reliable waterproof hexcopters with guts from DJI that utilize all the latest Lightbridge and camera tec.


While not strictly UAV related improvements in cameras have resulted in photographers describing some UAVs as flying tripods. Certainly the gimbals that hold and adjust the camera to compensate for movement of the UAV in flight have greatly improved, along with image stabilization in the camera itself. An interesting (at least to me as a photographer and UVA pilot) is that DJI has bought the Hasselblad camera company; no doubt to up their imaging game.


From my point of view this has nothing to do with marketing driven schemes but are real solid improvements that allow greater range, improved images that can be captured, and safer flying; all at a cost that is lower if corrected for inflation.
 
Joined
Jul 29, 2018
Messages
55
Points
8
"user CP''(control panel) is near the top on the far left side-- you can do and change things there/
also-the preferred search is at the bottom look for 'google'.... my slow ass dial-up ISP is so weak that I do not get to use that one from home.... its just not there!!

I got tons of help when I joined and continue to get help often. So feel free to PM me so I can do some 'payback' hak



Thanks for the help. PM sent.
 
Joined
Apr 2, 2009
Messages
10,662
Points
113
you are very welcome..

BTW
making a second post 2 min after the previous one is 'frowned' upon-- you can reply to both in one post using multi-quote then quote --edit and copy/paste-- and you can still merge them- no biggie - no harm or foul-- I have seen 6 posts in a row before.. and you can see that it is easy to avoid..

I must say your helpfulness on drones is very appreciated.. great post.. I am saving it.
len
reply to your PM coming..
 
Joined
Jun 3, 2007
Messages
2,560
Points
113
Thanks for the help. PM sent.

Peruse Sam's Laser FAQ. It's been present on the web for a longtime.

Hobbyist laser technology has not changed much since I've been interested, that was way back in the 90's. Oh sure, new wavelengths, less expensive lasers but that's it. There are other laser technologies but not available to the casual hobbyist. For the serious hobbyist with high discretionary money to spend there are.
 
Joined
Sep 20, 2008
Messages
17,622
Points
113
you are very welcome..

BTW
making a second post 2 min after the previous one is 'frowned' upon-- you can reply to both in one post using multi-quote then quote --edit and copy/paste-- and you can still merge them
- no biggie - no harm or foul-- I have seen 6 posts in a row before.. and you can see that it is easy to avoid..
I'm with you Len... I've already given him a friendly
Heads up on another Thread
It seems he only reads his own posts....:whistle:

Jerry
 
Last edited:




Top