Making complete laser

[CarbonAce]

Hi,

I bought one of these lasers from ebay, Powerful Blue Purple Laser Lazer Pointer Pen 1mW UK | eBay... I know they arent very good at all but they do the job, now i was changing the batteries and the coil that one end of the battery touched to complete the circuit has come off and on inspection has taken some of the board with it, now with a bit electrical knowledge i know this wont work, i have stripped it down and i have just a diode now the laser part itself, it has 2 pins on it i can find out which is + and - , now with out spending loads on a really powerful laser, is there anything i can do/buy to make this laser powerful, i.e. buy a driver and solder it on and hey presto its a burning laser sort of thing?

If someone would be kind enough to give me some links to some parts to buy to make it work and maybe a guide on how to assemble the laser and other parts i would be grateful, i do have soldering skills ETC...
And i would preferably like it to be a burning laser, but really powerful would be good enough.

Thanks :thanks:

 

[brendon7358]

It would be much easier --- and cheaper to just buy a new one.

 

[CarbonAce]

Not going to sound like an pain here, but i don't want to buy a new one.
I WANT to make a new one, it cant be that hard to find a driver to drive the diode?

 

[Flaminpyro]

You don't really need a driver just get the correct resistor to drop the excess current and your in business

 

[CarbonAce]

How do i know what voltage to drop it down to? it was 2xaaa's so 3v ?

 

[Xplorer877]

Hi,

I bought one of these lasers from ebay, Powerful Blue Purple Laser Lazer Pointer Pen 1mW UK | eBay... I know they arent very good at all but they do the job, now i was changing the batteries and the coil that one end of the battery touched to complete the circuit has come off and on inspection has taken some of the board with it, now with a bit electrical knowledge i know this wont work, i have stripped it down and i have just a diode now the laser part itself, it has 2 pins on it i can find out which is + and - , now with out spending loads on a really powerful laser, is there anything i can do/buy to make this laser powerful, i.e. buy a driver and solder it on and hey presto its a burning laser sort of thing?

If someone would be kind enough to give me some links to some parts to buy to make it work and maybe a guide on how to assemble the laser and other parts i would be grateful, i do have soldering skills ETC...
And i would preferably like it to be a burning laser, but really powerful would be good enough.

Thanks :thanks:

This type of question comes up all the time, and the short answer is... No. You can't take a 1mW diode and turn it into a burning laser. The little diode was never made for much more than 1mW or even 5mW what ever the case may be. You'll need at least 100mW before you get into the "burning" power levels.

Now to just repair your laser... well you kinda need to know how much current the diode pulled from the battery. It probably wasn't much if the output was only 1mW. Nevertheless, I've no idea what it would be. Also bluray 405nm (purple) diodes usually run on >4v so that means your diver boosted the voltage to well over 3 volts for the diode. If you really want to make it work again you can run it off 3 AA batteries (4.5v) with a resistor in series. Use a 100 ohm potentiometer and power it up. Slowly turn down the resistance until you see the laser come back on at its original power level. Don't go any further, you'll blow it. Measure the resistance and replace the pot with a resistor. Adding a electrolytic capacitor in parallel with the diode to protect it from voltage spikes wouldn't be a bad ideal.

If you want to build your own laser check out this site.
405nm Laser : Zen Cart!, The Art of E-commerce

Look around on this forum too. There are all kinds of diodes, divers, and hosts to get.

-Tony