7-Coloured Beams

[FireMyLaser]

Hi forum, I have dropped out of the hobby for a long while, but I recently got back into it.
Now there are so many more direct diode colors, so I made this device to make it easy and fun to experiment.
Just a large heatsink with a fan, and seven LM317 drivers with swappable resistors. The diodes are connected with separate socket pin for each lead.
A thin thermal pad under the lasers provide good heat transfer and also isolate them from each other, so it doesn't matter if a diode is case positive or negative.



660, 638, 520, 505, 488, 450 and 405nm.






488nm is my new favorite.




The housings can of course be angled in one flat plane for some crossing beams.



But after such a long stay away from the hobby there are still no yellow/orange diodes, are you kidding me...

 

[RedCowboy]

Very nice, love the line of beams and I also like the pretty aquamarine/teal color of the Sharp 488nm and it also makes a nice beam........funny I hated the teal paint phase when people were painting cars and bikes with teal years ago but as a beam of photons it's a neat wavelength, not really blue or green but something somewhere in between and our perception of it changes based on it's surroundings.

 

[FireMyLaser]

I find that you don't typically encounter pure cyan in real life. Monitors can't produces it, and there are basically no cyan LEDs.
That makes it such an interesting color ones you get to see it.

 

[Alaskan]

What is real cyan? nm to nm, range? Too bad the forum does not support (or, perhaps, not allowed now) GIF's, FireMyLaser had a cool gif of that wind generator. Good to see you post again.

 

[FireMyLaser]

I can only guess from my experience with LEDs, but I'd say true cyan is between 480 to 490nm, with my eyes.
It's quite a narrow range, as it quickly becomes distinctly blueish or greenish outside that.

I have only two 488nm laser diodes, and even they are different side by side.

 

[Giannis_TDM]

I can only guess from my experience with LEDs, but I'd say true cyan is between 480 to 490nm, with my eyes.
It's quite a narrow range, as it quickly becomes distinctly blueish or greenish outside that.

I have only two 488nm laser diodes, and even they are different side by side.

Its the nature of those sharp diodes, I guarantee not 2 diodes you buy are gonna be the same, this was even more extreme in the previous batch of diodes. They fluctuated between485 - 492. I have a 481 that needs to be properly spectroed( I used the kind of inaccurate method of a diffraction grating and math) And a 492 from Rich. I am thinking of getting a binned diode at 485.

 

[FireMyLaser]

485nm would be my closest bet on true cyan, or at least it will be close enough to not matter.
But I'm also thinking that since the perceived color change so much with just a few nm, I'm sure that any two people will have diffent opinions on it when seeing it at the same time.

 

[Alaskan]

Look how narrow the spread is for cyan:



485 it is.

 

[FireMyLaser]

Remember that monitors fail spectacularly at producing cyan, as a vibrant color. And all monitors are different too.

And it is the same for RGB lasers. When I make an even mix of 532nm green and 450nm blue, and then put a 488nm cyan next to it, the green+blue look totally washed out, almost white. I kid you not. Look here:



This is why I want to make a RGB+CV laser.