Hey I'm from NY, I'm a high school student. I've been interested with lasers ever since my dad took me to this awesome pink floyd laser light show way back when...I work on a lot of electrical engineering stuff with microcontrollers and digital circuits. I've made a few robots, MIDI controller,...you know, the usual haha.
Anyways, I saw some of the posts on this forum, and I'm astounded. I can't believe it can be so cheap to make a laser! I've drooled at the lasers on websites like wickedlasers.com, but I simply don't have the money to burn (no pun intended!). I own a 5mw wickedlasers 'core' green laser that I got when they first came out, and it's pretty cool, but it doesn't burn stuff! I want a laser with 250-300+mW of power. I just popped open a cheap-o DVD-RW drive, and found a nice red laser with a very nice collimator lens assembly and heat sink! What do you think the potential power output of this one is? This tutorial here (where I first got the idea): Laser Flashlight Hack!!
says it can be ~245mW? What are my best options right now for building a good laser pointer that's capable of 250-300mW+? I have stuff I can use for heatsinking, and I can even arrange a circuit that uses PWM (pulse width modulation) along with power transistors to keep the diode from dying from extended use if necessary or if it even helps. But I want it to be reliable enough that it will last. :evil: And I don't want to spend much, really, I'm broke!
Thanks for any help!
Anyways, I saw some of the posts on this forum, and I'm astounded. I can't believe it can be so cheap to make a laser! I've drooled at the lasers on websites like wickedlasers.com, but I simply don't have the money to burn (no pun intended!). I own a 5mw wickedlasers 'core' green laser that I got when they first came out, and it's pretty cool, but it doesn't burn stuff! I want a laser with 250-300+mW of power. I just popped open a cheap-o DVD-RW drive, and found a nice red laser with a very nice collimator lens assembly and heat sink! What do you think the potential power output of this one is? This tutorial here (where I first got the idea): Laser Flashlight Hack!!
says it can be ~245mW? What are my best options right now for building a good laser pointer that's capable of 250-300mW+? I have stuff I can use for heatsinking, and I can even arrange a circuit that uses PWM (pulse width modulation) along with power transistors to keep the diode from dying from extended use if necessary or if it even helps. But I want it to be reliable enough that it will last. :evil: And I don't want to spend much, really, I'm broke!
Thanks for any help!