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Somebody tonight was just telling me about a DIY "coffee-can foundry" which will let you melt and cast aluminum. I might look into that..

I think red is actually more visible than BluRay (at least 650 nm red, which is what most commonly available red diodes emit)...BluRay is near ultraviolet, so it's about as apparently dim as you can get.

Thanks! I'm trying to decide what to do for my next laser project...I've got two LPCs burning a hole in my pocket (so to speak).

Yeah, I'll buy that heatsink..PM me with details.

Thanks, all! It took about 5 hours to dremel out a big enough hole in that heatsink and the chassis to accommodate its module :( . But it does its job. Which, I guess, is burning holes through my black shirts and impressing my geekier friends. Happily, today I finally received my red laser...

Thanks! I like this one. Eudaimonium, I think I might actually go ahead and buy one of Jayrob's glass lenses, just to push this as high as I can...

I didn't measure the output - I was basing it on an LOC LPC power/current graph calculated after an acrylic lens. You're probably right - if yours is a decent gauge, it must be more like 250 mW. I'm just using an opened up stock AIXIZ. Guts are not so interesting -- just a DDL with the LM317...

Those LPC diodes are teh shite. This is a lab bench style, all brushed-aluminum build with external and internal heatsinks, putting out ~250 mW at 500 mA. Drilling through aluminum with a dremel tool sucks, btw.

Forgive my oversight, mfo.

Not to be a killjoy, but that waterfall picture is an illusion. I'm sure this only works with miniscule amounts of water, and it's only moving at 3 cm/s. You'd get orders of magnitude more power by sticking a turbine in a moving stream...

Actually, the maser preceded the laser by a few years. In fact, the original meaning of "Phaser" in Star Trek TOS was "PHotonic Maser" which is sort of redundant and, of course...a laser. They were being all science-fictiony, because nobody had ever heard of the laser. They changed it. Now it...

Seriosuly! They look good anyway..I have, at least, refrained from cutting a number of diodes out of their sled under these conditions....

Yeah! And yes, it is risky soldering drunk! I gotta' say, though -- somehow I've managed to make the best looking joints I've ever made, tonight :-/ We'll see if it actually works. I'm putting together a 500 mA LPC all aluminum labby-type thing.

Maybe it's my elevated blood-alcohol level, or that it's 3:40 AM, but I must say -- as I solder away at yet another DDL circuit -- there's something meditative about building a laser. A couple hours of thought and concentration results in a beam of red light that can light a match at twenty...

It's not hard to do, with a sufficiently powerful beam, focused close to the aperture. Here's a video of my LPC build doing it... YouTube - Optically Trapped Sharpie It's best if you do it in front of a black background, as it can sometimes be hard to see the effect.

Incidentally, I built a little variable current DDL driver with long, bare leads specifically to test diodes with. I used it to check out a couple IR diodes I ripped out of CD players - works great, and it's very easy to do. You just have to make sure to remember to short out its cap before you...

I'm 4 for 4 on laser builds right now. I don't expect that streak to last, though...But, since I'm a noob, maybe I can help from that perspective. I've been REALLY anal about protecting my diodes (I hate when things don't work). That means that I built myself a little ESD protective bracelet out...

My upcoming build is going to be a high power LPC, in what I'm hoping to be a from-scratch, heatsinked metal host. I'm trying to do everything myself, and I don't have access to a drill press. I'm wondering about the feasibility of molding a heatsink around an AIXIZ module using solder or...

Yeah - my mistake. I don't actually think he should lose any rep for that. It's not relevant.

It's okay to lase this one: