Thanks for sharing! Do you measure this ripple voltage as a current through a shunt resistor? If so, what resistance?
Some bigger, low ESR ceramics?
Okay, I understand that you follow what's going on too fastidiously. But what negative effect will that have on the diode when most people use laser pointers for short cycles. I have tested all kinds of converters from Aliexpress and they all work very well with laser diodes. None were damaged.
Yeah, Its completely different for high power blues, they don't really care, a nubm anything surviving a bad driver is nothing, one of my friends has blowtorched an m140 till red hot and it still lazed afterwards. => 'thousands of times per second, so my guess is, ripple probably won't do any damage, as long as the ripple peak never exceeds the diode's rated voltage / amperage.' I agree with this, high ripple means briefly over-currenting the diode millions of times per second, it might not die imminently or never for the specific diode you are testing, may be a unicorn or something. That is another problem with this, 2 diodes will never be the same so you have to account for the 'worst' one when making a driver. The damage mechanism can vary but its generally one of these: Bonding wires overheat and cant take it or at the faucets, the coated-on mirror gets degraded and eventually leads to catastrophic optical damage. Especially working with single modes due to the nature of them where the die itself is smaller and the bonding wires fewer they can be killed much much easier, especially when talking about low power single mode violets, greens and reds, Blues are more resilient and the sharp 488 and 505nm diodes have proved to be an exception regarding their durability. Killing them is really hard, the true test for a diode driver will always be the 405nm single mode 700mw BDR diode. That thing simply does not survive any ripple in excess of 50-100mV on voltage and 50+mA of current ripple.
