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ArcticMyst Security by Avery

About heatsinking the driver

svdr

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I am in the process of building a WF 501B M140 project with 1.8A Lazeerer X-Drive and Eudamonium WF501B heatsink (for the diode).

As I'm reading through this forum, I see that some of you attach a separate small copper heatsink on the driver board. I see others attach the driver to the diode heatsink by means of thermal epoxy. Yet there are still others that don't heatsink the driver board at all.

While 1.8A may well be a serious load for the M140, I will run it at short duty cycles, like 30sec or so at max.

Would it be OK to glue the driver board inside the Euda sink with thermal compound, or would you say that a separate heatsink is better (or required!)?
 





Blord

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It is best to heatsinked the driver. Anything is better than just air floating around.
 
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He does say it in his sale thread
Lazeerer said:
Though this driver does not need heatsink much i recommend it over 1.6A for continuous run time or 1.7A if using a long duty cycle ~2 minutes. But again the driver barely gets hot. There is also a built in thermal protection that i have not seen before. I will be uploading a video shortly to show this. Basically you cannot kill this driver due to over heating.
Any more than that, you might wanna PM him to ask.
 
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Not sure about the Xdrive, but usually the IC is heat sinked. So yes if you put thermal epoxy on the IC and have it directly glued to the main heat sink it should be ok. Just be aware that if you are trying to put the driver in the round hole, where the module fits, you should epoxy a small piece of copper or aluminiumto the IC, which has been sanded down to match the curvature of the hole in the heatsink. What you dont want is the thermal epoxy filling the gap, instead you want the thinnest layer of epoxy possible. Take a look at this pic to see what I mean. I made it for a 1.8 A driven M140.

7460-1210-laser-dtr-003.jpg


Edit: Just noticed it may look like the layer of epoxy is quite thick, but it isnt, the epoxy was squeezed out around the edges...;)
 
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Thought I might just ask here rather than make a new thread.... I'm embarrassed to ask this but what / where is the IC on the driver board? :eek:

I hope you don't mind me jumping in on your thread, I have been curious about how to properly heat sink these as well and wondering where the IC is. :p
 
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:thanks:

That is very helpful, I still have not built my first laser but these little bits of info are immensely helpful to fill in the gaps of missing pieces of understanding for me.

Do all drivers have this same component? Can you just feel for the heat with your fingers to see what parts get hot? (Shows how little I understand about electronics.... I know :p)
 
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Linears yes they have this particular chip. For the V6 buck I think that the chip in the lower right would need to be heat sinked. I have not played with a V6 so Im not 100 % sure.

scaled.php


There is also a pic of a different V6 on the Cajunlasers website: 1.8 amp X-Drive V6 - $19.99 : Cajunlasers Store

The IC would be the chip on the back of the board, the lower of the 2 drivers in the pic.:beer:

Edit: Theoretically you could check to see which component gets hot, but youd risk damaging it. I once ran a Moh linear without heat sinking at 750 mA, just to test the driver, and it started to smell very strongly. The chip got very hot! ;)
 
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Can you just feel for the heat with your fingers to see what parts get hot?

Actually, you can! :p
Just do a test run and give a feel which components would be the ones heating up the most. It's better than any theoretical analysis we could come up with.
 
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Thank you very, very much again for your help! I really appreciate the time you took to add the pictures and links. :beer: :beer: :beer:

I think I should try and find a book or an online resource relating to electronics. I often wonder how everyone here learned so much about the subject. I really wish they had taught electronics in school as apart of shop class, I feel really left behind compared to what seems to be common knowledge here to most people. :eek:

Edit: Thanks as well, Tw15t3r that is really great to know the heat can be finger checked! :D
 
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Oh, wow that link is great!

Looks like some really good reading and exactly what I have been hoping to find! Thanks a bunch! :angel:

:topic:

I'll leave the floor now to the opening poster. ;)
 
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Laik

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Great to see your problem solved! You can learn a lot by just searching things on these forums that you are curious about or even search random stuff if you are bored. I was introduced to lasers as a small child with one of those cheap red key chains and always thought they were fascinating and i have only really started to get into them now. It sucks in Australia because i hate labby's so everything that i do with lasers is illegal :( It is that one idiot that ruins it for the whole of Australia :gun:
 

svdr

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Wow- Been away for a couple of days and see what happens!
No problem ElectroMagneticFreak, many of your questions are now clear to me, too. After all a forum serves to share knowledge.

Thank you all, gentlemen!
 
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It doesn't seem to take much to dissipate heat from the X-Drive. I ran the laser and did the finger test to see what got hot. It's a 2.2a driver, and the only chip that got warm was the one on the back( the one with all the pins coming out). I used some thermal epoxy and a bent piece of 12 gauge solid copper wire as a heat sink. Seems to work great.

DSC_5494_zps38735993.jpg
 

svdr

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Thanks, DesertWolf. That is very informative. In determining the temp, would you say that the IC only gets a little bit warm (i.e. so that it could in fact left like that, without heatsink), or actually rather hot (heatsinking required).

Regards,
 




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