Re: 6x Blu-ray SLEDS!!! GROUP BUY!!!
thesk8nmidget said:
anyone with a 6x wanna chime in on what they are running theirs at and what kind of duty cycles you have and also what you think is safe for CW?
Like i mentioned.. I drive my $350 6x diode at 197.6mA... It used to do 193mW, but it MIGHT be degrading. Altho i just measured it at 189mW again, where it seeems to have stabilised. It went through a lot of use, and was left on untill the battery protection kicked in one night, by "accident"...
I wanted to push it for a while, but now i definitelly will (for the greater good :
oh, and more power, yeah, that too).. 221mA is the next current, i will report the results..
However, i wish i would have measured the threshold at the very beginning. A mad scientist friend of mine told me some interesting discoveries about 405nm diode degradation. Their slope efficiency stays the same, but the threshold current climbs (the graph just moves to the right but retains the same shape). If you increase the current by the difference in threshold, you get the original power back. This is quite different from reds, where it is the slope efficiency, that drops, when they degrade (the graph becomes less steep, but the threshold doesn't change much). In both cases the result is a power drop, but it happens in a different way.
But it means, that degradation in blu rays can much better be detected by measuring the threshold current. The power varies too much with temperature, so it is hard to say for sure, unless you see a steady drop over a week, with no returning of power, when it's colder..
So i'll measure the threshold before pushing it to 221mA, and then again after a week of (ab)use, especially if i notice some power drop.
