Identifying Diode Information

[Litehouse43]

Hi all, new to the forum as well as lasers. Poking around on youtube sparked my interest a while back and since then I’ve been trying to learn more about DIY laser projects. From what I have seen there is a lot of information about each diode that really dictates the other components I would purchase. I took the disc drive out of an old dell laptop and extracted the diode. Is there a way I’m supposed to be able to identify the diode type and then know what safety glasses I would need or the correct voltage to use or the driver to purchase? Is this information somehow known by the type of sled or the model of the disc drive?
Can’t wait to continue learning about lasers, finally is there any place to find an overview of DIY Laser projects to cut down on future questions? Don’t want to be a burden so questions are plentiful at this point. Thanks!

 

[Coherent Light]

Was it from a CD/DVD burner or just a reader? You can learn some details by knowing the speed of the drive. Even that will probably just give you a rough estimate of the current you can push through it.

Welcome to LPF.

 

[qumefox]

Your diode identification starts by identifying what kind of drive it was. If it was a CD read only drive, it will only have a low power 780nm IR diode. If it was a CD burner, it will be higher power depending on the drive write speed, but still IR. DVD drives will have both 660nm diodes and 780nm diodes, though sometimes they're combined in the same diode housing. Again, readers will have weak diodes and the burners will have stronger ones The higher the burn speed, the stronger the diode usually.

Bluray is the same, except those sleds will have 3 diodes 405nm, 660nm, and 780nm. Again, in some sleds, sometimes the 660 and 780 are combined.

 

[Litehouse43]

I pulled it out of an old dell 8W007-a01 which is a 24x/24x/24x/8x rewritable. When I opened it up it looked like there were two diodes but I messed up pulling out the other. Is there a way to distinguish which is which or their power by their placement? Or maybe a database of different kinds of sleds? Or a database of laser information for beginers?

 

[qumefox]

You can sometimes tell by the coatings on the optics the lasers go through in the sled but not always. About all you can really do is experiment to figure out which you managed to salvage.

 

[Litehouse43]

Is there some way depending on the color of the light of something? To do testing what else would I need to buy? From what I understand I need:
A power source - I have batteries and a computer 250w psu I was going to use.
A Driver- Was planning on purchasing - http://hacylon.case.edu/ebay/laser_diode/Groove_2.php#form
An an Aixiz module
Some sort of saftey glasses. Any reccomendations on these?

Would there be anything else required?
Thanks!