You guys are great! Thank you!!

New to forum- just had to join because MY NEW LASER WORKS PERFECTLY!! ;D0

Got the red diodes pre-installed into optics from SenKat, used Daedal's driver diagram and RS parts, and holy-moly, I just cut my first piece of electrical tape in half! Assembly took all of a half hour!

I built my first laser in 1969 (a He-Ne... got the tube from Metrologic Instruments - apparently a bar code scanner company now), a whopping 5 mW output! I was so excited when that one worked and produced the very first laser beam I ever saw. I was 16 with a passion for science, and a laser was just about the coolest thing imaginable back then. I've worked with some pretty sophisticated lasers since then, and even have some patents in the field of electro-optics. But I gotta tell ya, in the nearly 40 years (gad!) I've been playing/working with lasers, for shear $ per unit of fun, the SenKat/Daedal set-up is the best! Thank you guys for making this old laser geekette very happy!!

Laura

So I take it that for a while you have been a Lurking Lady Laser Lover?

Congrat's on your new build, you are so right about the SenKat / DDL combo, simple but very effective.

Welcome to the forum

Regards rog8811

Welcome to the forum! Yep, you can't beat SenKat or DDL for value!!

Indeed, I've been lurking here for a couple weeks, so the L[sup]4 [/sup]moniker is pretty accurate

I used the 25 ohm rheostat coupled to 5 ohms of 'safety' resistance (2 10's in parallel)- running from a 6v lantern battery (the kind that are about the size of a large coffee mug, but block-shaped). I kept creeping up the current until I had maxed-out the pot-- the laser handled it fine. After a few minutes, the case temp on the module was slightly warm to the touch (I taped it down to a large finned heatsink for the quick bench test).

It occurred to me during construction that I could assemble the entire driver circuit right on the rheostat housing using wire-tree construction, so I think I'll toss one of those together today and see how it goes. Still just sort of blows me away that so much light can come from such a small source. Oh, BTW, I took the lens off the module to let the light fan out from the diode and flood the wall with speckle- light... it makes a great source for Schlieren imaging! I could easily see the refraction caused by the gas-jet from a lighter.

Laura

Hi & Welcome to the forum! I'm pretty much in the same boat as you, but I started in solid state lasers- ruby specifically. Back in the days when pulse energy was measured in how many razor blades you could pop a hole through! Most of my laser stuff was gas also, with a cool blue argon 10mW and HeNe being the majority of my work.

Like you, I recently came across this forum and purchased Senkat's diodes, ran up Daedal's driver, and started burning holes in things for the first time since 1972! Beware- it's addictive! Far too much time can get sunk into this hobby!

As I'm sure you know already, there are a LOT of very helpful and kind people on here who share this hobby, and I'm certain you'll have a great time here.

Dave

Nice to be here, thanks!

xanatos said:

... Back in the days when pulse energy was measured in how many razor blades you could pop a hole through! ...

Click to expand...

Ah yes, that unit of laserosity known as the 'Gillette' Oh how I wanted to build a ruby laser! But I was just a kid then. My very very first knowledge of lasers came from My Weekly Reader, a publication handed out to us in grade school. It was '61, I was in the 2nd grade, and there was an article in one issue about a camera that didn't need lenses. Well, that was REAL interesting because a few days earlier, I had just gotten a tail-whacking for taking my dad's old Brownie camera apart and removing the lenses to play with, so I was rather 'sensitized' to the fact that cameras had lenses and one without them must be something pretty amazing. Needless to say, the article was about holography with lasers. That article ended up spurring a life-time of interest and career motivation in optics and engineering.

Addicting is right! I stayed up way late last night cutting paper shapes free-hand. I think I will build a pantograph so I can replicate shapes and letters and stuff. I also have a pair of old flatbed scanners that should make a nice x-y motion platform for a more sophisticated approach. But I am having too much analog fun right now to dive into that with any seriousness- maybe in a month or so I'll get the post-script stuff working on that old PC in the closet again and rig up the steppers and hardware to cut pretty doilies and paper dolls for my granddaughter.

Apologies to the young 'uns for the old-timer chit-chat here, but it's nice to know some of us still have the kid in us that makes us want to wreak a little havoc with devices of our own fabrication.

Welcome to the forum! Glad you were able to get things working w/out any problems.

I'm almost 40 too and this is both the least expensive and most fun laser project I've ever done.

I really didn't get 'in' to the entire laser thing until almost 2000, when green DPSS pointers started showing up. That got me hooked on diode lasers. Prior to that I'd ordered a ~1 mW surplus HeNe laser in the late 80's - that was fun but the power supply meant it wasn't very portable.

I'm looking forwards to higher power LDs, and for my next project I'm thinking of making a blueray pointer.

The way things are going I'll be an old man before the really interesting stuff comes out.