Looks great!
It reminds me of maybe 15 years ago when you'd find those laser pens on ebay/amazon that claimed to be blue but were just cheap 405's
But this is the real deal🍻
Hey guys,
I am looking to buy a custom heatsink that would fit inside the head of a 2D cell Maglite. Either one made to fit a 9mm diode via press, or one with a 12mm bore for a module to be set with a hex screw. Either would work nicely. If you have one or know of someone selling some - I'm...
Welcome to the world of lasers. And props for good discretion 🍻 Maybe when they're a little older and understand the dangers you guys can get more involved. Building a laser would make for a great project with them.
I think Giannis is right here. It's hard to say what killed the diode, but I would try to figure that out before replacing it. Especially if it was the driver that failed.
Like you said, the diode itself doesn't require much voltage but sometimes 1 battery is insufficient for both the voltage drops of the diode and driver.
that looks plenty bright to me! This is a multimode diode so the beam profile will be ugly to say the least... You can play around with the focus but the the beam will always be rectangular like that
Edit: It's a bit hard to tell on the brightness on a second glance. Do you have a LPM? Or...
If you can see light but it's way too dim, then I can think of two possibilities:
1) you already killed the diode
2) you're running the diode just below the threshold current (the diode can't draw enough current to properly lase)
You may have soldered to the wrong diode pin. It looks like the right pin is positive, the middle negative and the left is the case pin.
Edit: My next guess is you may have mixed up the polarity somewhere along the way. Do you have a multimeter? This will help troubleshoot polarity problems...