Anyone have info on modifying Laserglow Aries?

[brendon7358]

Just got one off ebay for $110 not a bad deal I don't think. They have no idea how powerful it is, only that it's probably more powerful than a 20mW laser they sold once.

If it's less than 75mW I'm going to try to pot mod it to see if I can get it to 100-150mW and if that fails, I want to look into replacing the module with a new one from CNI. Such a nice laser would be a waste if it's like 30mW.

Anyone done this before? Have any advice? Is it a terrible idea? Thanks.

 

[brendon7358]

Success!
The laser I got peaked at around 50mW and averaged around 40mW so the specs of a 35mW unit. Not great, but acceptable considering new a 35mW unit is more than twice the price I paid. But this laser is way too nice for a measly 40mW!

Disassembly was a bit nerve wracking but I got it done, and I was happy to find a pot on the driver.

420mA was written on the side of the module. So I hooked it up to my power supply supplying 3V @ 1.5A to simulate the 2x C batteries it uses. Sure enough it drew right around 420mA. So I slowly turned the pot to increase the current and watched the output. Just going up to 450mA jumped the output to around 75mW! I gradually increased up to 550mA. Getting around 138mW. At this point the output didn't seem to be going any higher so I shut it down and let it cool.

I fired it back up and slowly decreased the current to find the optimal current to output ratio. I found all the way to 515mA the output didn't change much, only down to about 120-130mW. But 510mA and below it dropped a lot more. So I set it to 515mA and let it run for a bit and got 130mW.

So I put the laser back together, which was about as difficult as taking it apart was due to the button. Laserglow says up to 250mW this laser has an unlimited duty cycle, and they test their lasers for 10 minutes. So I did the same. After letting it cool for a bit I did a 10 minute lpm test which I will post below, it started out with a peak of 120mW, went down to 115mW and gradually increased back to 120mW and stayed there for about 6 minutes. At this point it increased to 130mW with a peak of 136mW. After that it stayed rock solid at 130mW for the remainder of the test. So now it is functionally a high end Aries-100 or low end Aries-125. I'll go with the former just because overspec is better than underspec.



p.s. I know this is a double post but I feel it's justified.

p.s.s. I know this would be a lot more exciting if it was like 2013 but give me a break, I couldn't get my hands on one of these at the time lol

 

[hwang21]

Nice job! Would be interested in seeing pics of the teardown/reassembly of the host, but no biggie if you didn't take any that unlimited duty cycle is very nice!

 

[brendon7358]

I didn't, my apologies but there are other posts on the forum of people who have. They even went down to the diode level. I didn't go that far.