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A better packed 40W beam from 7 parallel beams

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Feb 12, 2016
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Hi

This thread as another continuation of that one called "Gatling laser":

but here my next project will be to correct 7 collimated beams from an intact NUBM44 block with closed can diodes instead of 8 beams from NUBM08 block with crappy focusing G-balls.

First of all, I needed to check if a close to perfect collimation of all beams is possible if all G-2 are fixed on a custom made plate positioned on the top of the N. block.


For this I let CNC workshop make me a plate with 16 holes each having the right thread. The threads made there were so tight that I had to widen them a little passing again the tap into all of the holes.

Now I fixed it on top of a light engine taken from an old v1 projector. Without fan its Al heatsink can allow to work at 0.5A for a minute without warming too much. The difficult part here was to discover which of the wires were + and -.
About one minute of work was enouth to find the right position for each lens - so it was possible to obtain all 7 beam spots as straight lines on the ceiling. And it looks that all LDs in the block were installed almost perfecly parallel.


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Now this is one I want to see completed, you should be able to get a much tighter beam/beam cluster than with the 08 GBall block after your knife edging/alignment.

May I suggest that you add the one missing laser diode, you don't have to use indium of course you can use artic silver thermal adhesive.

I will be watching this thread with interest. :D
 
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I've been trying to get a handle on how to align the beams from several diodes all in a block for some time now, a cheap way to do it. Haven't come up with a cheap way yet. Maybe there is a cheap and dirty way to align them I haven't considered yet, bet there is.

Thank you for posting your projects, great stuff. Following with interest.
 
This build will not be fast, could easily take a year to accomplish.

There could be a cheap and dirty way if all LDs in a block would be installed exactly parallel. In real life they are not - so one adjustable mirror pro beam is the most logical way to fix this issue. You could also fix the directions by tilting G-2 barrels but it would not be easy to keep all of them in different positions. Here I prefer to treat each beam in the same way, this helps to avoid a lot of engineering problems and I only have to use one plate for one type of lenses no matter how many beams there are...

Same thing with NUBM08: the main problem is not the presence of G-balls, but the fact that each of G-balls even in the same block makes different kind of collimation/focusing. If they all would be same, there could be a way to make the beam as good as with closed can diodes I assume.

Maybe someone like LD sellers who deal with many blocks could bin them and find a perfect one but my aim here is to use the ordinary one as found in open market.
 


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