BMW to develop Laser Headlights

[Tech_Junkie]

You're right. I get grumpy around 4-6AM.

 

[Fiddy]

hehe you up lasing while the people sleep?

 

[Tech_Junkie]

I like the night. Always have. The only trouble is they roll up the streets around 11PM where I live. So there is not much to do but blab on the forum.

 

[Fiddy]

Oh ok fair enough, is that you in your avatar?

 

[Tech_Junkie]

The Three Stooges Official Website :: Bios - Curly Howard

 

[joeyss]

What you have to watch out for is back reflection. If you catch a bad reflection it could go COD. Its happened before with dust caps a few times. One guy toasted his 8X bouncing it off his beer.

I'm only using my 50mw 405 for that one, but I found a yellow highlighter cap that absorbs 99%+ of 405 and emits around 30-50% of it as a yellow-greenish light. I was able to make a nice bright beam that looked like a led by using my 470mw with it , but it gets a little hot as you can tell so I have to shut it of or THERE will be a hole in it. I'm thinking about trying this with some of those UV leds at radio shack since it could make a way brighter light. Also I just need a resistor on the led to use it with a battery right?

 

[mark-in-dallas]

Oddly, the source article also mentions how lasers are monochromatic and coherent, and can produce low divergence. Obviously these properties are lost immediately when you use a phosphor, so its unclear what they will chuck out eventually.

They ain't throwing anything out, instead there will be a kill switch to replace thephosphor with a lense, and a dial on the dashboard to focus the beam. Get the hell out of my way idiot, or else!!!!

 

[Benm]

What you have to watch out for is back reflection. If you catch a bad reflection it could go COD. Its happened before with dust caps a few times. one guy toasted his 8X bouncing it off his beer.

... guess it wasnt only reflection at work there

 

[divindavid]

Damn! I hope I can buy them for my E46!

 

[chefla]

Has anybody played with remote phosphor yet? A company called Intematix has a few patents for this technology. And I was wondering if we could use a beam expander on a 405 or 445 diode, shine the beam through a phosphor disc and collimate it again? Or will the emission from the phosphor be so divergent that we can not properly collimate the light afterwards?

 

[BShanahan14rulz]

http://www.cree.com/products/pdf/XLampXP-E.pdf
vs. its remote phosphor brother
http://www.cree.com/products/pdf/XLampXP-E-HEW.pdf

the HEW is harder to focus because of the larger emitting area. The emitting area on the ordinary XP-E is the phosphor layer (yellow stuff, in this LED) that is directly on the chip, while the phosphor on the HEW version is in the dome. This allows more light to make it out of the chip and into the phosphor, and more light from the phosphor to escape the package instead of being reabsorbed by the chip or phosphor.

TL;DR: in Cree XP-E, remote phosphor yields higher efficiency with the sacrifice of a larger emitting area.

 

[chefla]

Thanks. I did not know that CREE had also some sort of remote phosphor.
Does anybody know what the emitter size of our 445 diodes is? The article at the beginning of the post is stating that the emitters BMW will use are 10um. Could that mean that they are using single mode emitters?

 

[BShanahan14rulz]

This is going by memory, of which I seem to have very little, but I believe our multimode 445s have an emitting area of ~50um

 

[holmebrian]

anyone actually seen one yet or they still prototyping it?

 

[BShanahan14rulz]

Nobody has seen them and been able to see anything else afterwards. :na:

 

[shintashi]

Yeh, lets buy 100,000 dollar cars to harvest laser diodes from! Mustb good profit

after seeing how much the 2-12W lasers cost, and how many diodes you can get out of some projectors, maybe it's a deal? Especially if used. I don't even know enough about these new headlights to know if I should be serious. :undecided: