- Joined
- Jul 3, 2010
- Messages
- 9
- Points
- 0
It's alot, I'll be honest. The simple fact that a user must acquire many different basic skills in order to make even the most simple of home made lasers is pretty interesting. I came into this and only recently got a starter pointer, but this hobby has been pretty much on my mind ever since. I want to take the next step and not only acquire more professional handhelds, but also make my own from manually harvested diodes. There's so many different things I have to take in it's pretty crazy. You have to have:
Basic soldering skills
Understand the different components of a circuit board and how they work
Understand the diode itself
Basic optical fundamentals
Basic laser physics like divergance and how to calculate it using mRads
Beam diameter size and why it matters
Color spectrum wavelengths
Different types of lasers like gas, chemical, dpss
And the math to make it all fit
I don't want to read a guide about how to make a home made laser which just says "the capacitor you just bought, wire it to this" without understanding WHY. But then again I don't want to get caught up in some sort of recursive information tree that starts to deviate from the essential goal of making a basic laser.
What I'm saying is, I'm going to be diving into many different things and acquiring many different skills at once, which I think is great, but is alot to take in, it's too bad I didn't have some these skills beforehand. :yh: Even the very first part (which was about a week ago) was figuring out what I needed to figure out. So with all that said
Any of you know of a good starter guide?
I was hoping to read http://laserpointerforums.com/f36/looking-build-laser-read-me-47684.html , but alas, it was taken down. 
Basic soldering skills
Understand the different components of a circuit board and how they work
Understand the diode itself
Basic optical fundamentals
Basic laser physics like divergance and how to calculate it using mRads
Beam diameter size and why it matters
Color spectrum wavelengths
Different types of lasers like gas, chemical, dpss
And the math to make it all fit
I don't want to read a guide about how to make a home made laser which just says "the capacitor you just bought, wire it to this" without understanding WHY. But then again I don't want to get caught up in some sort of recursive information tree that starts to deviate from the essential goal of making a basic laser.
What I'm saying is, I'm going to be diving into many different things and acquiring many different skills at once, which I think is great, but is alot to take in, it's too bad I didn't have some these skills beforehand. :yh: Even the very first part (which was about a week ago) was figuring out what I needed to figure out. So with all that said
Any of you know of a good starter guide?
I was hoping to read http://laserpointerforums.com/f36/looking-build-laser-read-me-47684.html , but alas, it was taken down. 
