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I like Dave's videos for sure - and there are several other channels like bigclive or julian illet amongs many others i'd recommend watching. I don't always agree with them, but their content is interesting to watch regardless. Designing a laser driver has a lot of constraints: small envelope...

ESD risks are often over-estimated quite a bit. Surely a big static discharge can kill a diode (or virtually any semiconductor) under the worst circumstances. The most important thing is to have everything at the same static potential - which does not have to be ground but preferably is -...

If you're doing the design from scratch, i'd still say go with the uC. There are some many changes you can do in firmware instead of re-wiring hardware that just makes it worth it. Industry in general seems to have embraced this route too, in many products you'll find the "nameless 8 pin chip"...

There are some options here - apparently this laser needs a battery voltage close to 1.5 volt per cell to operate, though may not be the only problem: 0.7 amps on a good alkaline C cell is not that big of a load, so it really shouldn't lose much power in a few minutes on fresh cells. I suspect...

I guess the tabs are spot welded on there, but are they made of some material that doesn't take solder at all? If you can get proper cells from reliable vendors that would obviously be preferable, but there are so many bogus ebay listings i don't trust them anymore.

How are you measuring the voltage though? Are you just using 2 wires from the power supply, or a 4 wire solution so the power supply can actually see what's being delivered to the load? The current indication on the power supply would be accurate regardless, but the voltage not so much if using...

One source of such small batteries could be electronic cigarettes, even (or especially) the disposable ones. Oddly many disposable ones seem to just have a rechargeable lipo in them, though make sure this is actually the case! You may also be able to find suitable cells of this site as...

It's the sensor that's likely the problem indeed, and if it's the same as the one from the previous model there would be little point in doing a teardown. If the coating is different, or perhaps even the whole thermal design from the absorbing surface through the TEC and then onto the case was...

Probably... but i guess the goal is just finding where the phone in your house is? If you're unable to call it, send a text message to it - at least when it does something audible upon receiving one. If the coverage is bad but sometimes barely usable the text message will come through at some...

I guess it'd look more like a big steampunk style raygun indeed :D

But if it was actually a very good meter, build cheaply but smartly? What if it even was accurate, for only $55. If it was actually good it'd be a fantastic deal and everyone should buy one. I seriously doubt it is due to the odd measurements obtained at lower power levels, but those are just...

Well, pretty cool build, but also fairly unpractical, and probably quite fragile as well: bend any of the arms on that thing and you have a grossly misaligned laser. Building all of it in one 2D plane would be much better since you could at least have a sturdy base plate to keep things in...

I'm not really sure what's going on here. Looking at picture 14A it seems like the diodes are not all inserted in the same orientation in the block. The mis-alignment doesn't seem to be that large, and may even be due to the photo angle/perspective, but could also be really there. If that were...

I'm not excluding it actually just i some random voltage meter with opamps to scale the sensor signal, but i also just meant what i'd do go get it built on a small budget. Throwing in a microcontroller that is under $1 and can both do the conversion, linearity correction and drive the display...

The ring idea sounds interesting, but that could be pretty bulky a dificult to build compared to combining laser diode outputs that are all in the same flat plane. Yeah, it's all a bit relative anyway. I suppose an average laptop is a portable computer to post people, but if you had a...

I guess the success of this project mostly hinges on the diodes in a block being identical, as well as their factory fitted lenses and such, so in the end it could all be focused down onto a single spot. I hope this works out, and think the chances would be reasonable given the original...

Possibly, regardless of if they went with a microchip or atmel solutions, the baked in ADC's could do this. I'm not sure what they are doing, but to get a 9999 count meter you would need a resolution of 13 bits or so. If you add a bit of noise to the input pin you can get that from a 10 bit...

I'd call that luggable more than portable really. I get your radio definition, especially from the past where you'd have something that'd be in a backpack with a darn car battery as a power source, and a HF antenna that would bascially require you to run wire between a couple of trees to get a...

I would not be surprised if that was the case, and they just displayed '0' for values that should technically be negative (i.e. sensor being colder than heatsink). Since it's so tiny i would not expect the heatsinking to be able to do a proper job - it does't look like the outside of this...

Interestingly in space you have other problems like increased ionizing radiation that could also kill a laser diode. There would be no need to do anything like that to see how diodes behave in a hard vacuum though, plenty of methods to do that on the ground. What i've found odd is that some...