I suppose this has been answered before, but all threads I've found dealt with more of a workshop setting, as far as I understand, and I'm looking specifically for a handheld pointer solution.
Long story short, I'm building a handheld laser pointer. I'm using
Survival Laser Stainless Steel Host Assembly,
445nm AR Coated Standard Glass Lens Assembly,
NUBM08 laser diode,
the rest is probably irrelevant
Everything works, but the thing is - I can't focus the beam at longer distances, it always appears as a rectangle. The diode seems to have some pretty good focusing by itself, as without a lens it has little dispersion (beam width at 3m is about 5cm). With lens, though, it's unsurprisingly a huge blob. Tried to use two identical lenses, but best I could do was to focus it back into the same line (or rectangle at longer distances) again.
Anyway, question - is there a practical, handheld applicable way to focus the beam into a dot, or at least prevent it from dispersing so much? I know that prisms can be used to shorten the line and make it more square, as well as cylindrical lenses, but these solutions seem more applicable to a lab or workshop setting, and are rather impractical for a handheld device. What could I do to focus it very finely?
Long story short, I'm building a handheld laser pointer. I'm using
Survival Laser Stainless Steel Host Assembly,
445nm AR Coated Standard Glass Lens Assembly,
NUBM08 laser diode,
the rest is probably irrelevant
Everything works, but the thing is - I can't focus the beam at longer distances, it always appears as a rectangle. The diode seems to have some pretty good focusing by itself, as without a lens it has little dispersion (beam width at 3m is about 5cm). With lens, though, it's unsurprisingly a huge blob. Tried to use two identical lenses, but best I could do was to focus it back into the same line (or rectangle at longer distances) again.
Anyway, question - is there a practical, handheld applicable way to focus the beam into a dot, or at least prevent it from dispersing so much? I know that prisms can be used to shorten the line and make it more square, as well as cylindrical lenses, but these solutions seem more applicable to a lab or workshop setting, and are rather impractical for a handheld device. What could I do to focus it very finely?