Noobie here - harvested 650nm from a 16x dvdrw

Hey all,

I've only been reading up on lasers for the past day and talking to DTR a little here and there.

This will be my first public post.

Anyway, so I harvested a couple diodes, here they are before the heatsinks were removed.






I'm wondering if there is any way to test the red laser diode before actually soldering and putting stuff together?

Do you want to test it to see if it works, or to make sure it's RED and not IR? If i had to guess i'd say the recessed one is the IR, that's how they are in the LPC sleds...

For testing if the RED works you can just hook it up to your driver set at minimum current first, then raise slowly and see what happens. Search the forum for pinout, go to Tutorials section and read the All Diodes Sticky, I think all RED diodes have the same pinouts. Good luck!

Just an additional peice of info Prior to solderering to driver, Short the capacitor first on the driver either with screwdriver or wire.

On the Diode dye IR usually has a code of some sort on it (not all though).

The pinout for reds is

___o
o -
___o +