Daedal said:
Agreed... I am currently working on making a nice little body to make one labby-style laser with one of the diodes I am getting from the SenKat group buy. After looking at the requirements and the ability to run these things CW at some decent power with sufficient cooling, I liked the figures and will post a thread soon on what I come up with.
Also... I got my digital caliper and completely forgot about updating the pictures, glad you revived this thread. I'll update them tomorrow I hope.
--DDL
I got mine today and good grief these things are small...lol. But man am I impressed. Even the diode that comes with it produces a nice bright red dot.
Well here is what I did. I ordered 5 and at the price I wasn't concerned about saving the diode, so I knocked it out...yup destroyed it. I have two brand new diodes I received from heruursciences. I mounted one of those diodes to the module with my vice. The only thing I had small enough to press it in with was a cable end. The part that crimps to the center of cable coax is what I used to press the diode into the module. It went in super tight and I did not use any thermal grease.
Next I found a jack from one of my broken down DVD-Roms and plugged the diode into it. It will fit snug, but I did spread the leads of the diode just a little bit to make it plug in as snug as I could. This is much easier than soldering wires to the diode. And of course it makes it easier to swap out the diode when/if the diode turns into an LED..ha..ha.
Finally I hooked up my capacitor and a 5 ohm resistor to a three cell battery pack. I tested the current the diode is drawing, around 175ma. But the most amazing part is the lens in these little guys! I was able to light a gray headed match almost instantly. And it lights a safety match instantly. Both were Non sharpied!! Since the current draw of the diode is only 175ma, it is putting out less than 100mw. I will admit this was less than a foot away, and I still have some more experimenting to do. But the bottom line is for the price, these little modules can't be beat. Imagine how well the diodes we have coming in the group buy will work with these modules.. ;D
Here is what I am finding with lenses. I have a diode I took out of a 16X Benq Lightscribe drive mounted in a Meredith module with a glass lens. When I focus it for distance, it is also focused for burning up close. This does not seem to apply to some of the other lenses I have played with including the one in the Aixiz module. With the Aixiz, if focused for burning, it will not be focused for distance, and visa versa. I hope that makes sense. BUT, these lenses when focused for burning are some kind of powerful.
Anyway, I when it gets dark I will compare the beams between the Meredith module and the Aixiz module. Now I am really getting curious
Edited: The resistor I am using is 5 ohms. Actually I have two 10 ohm resistors connected in parallel..Duh!
BTW, I can already tell the beam is going to be brighter than the beam coming from my Merideth module. But it will also be smaller in diameter.