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FrozenGate by Avery

Orange 607nm 170mW kvant Labby

Those are some nice beam colours!

I think that is all marketing. It sounds a lot better than violet ray, or near UV ray. Though 405nm is not really near UV.

I'm not really sure how they got to the name bluray, but it does sound a bit better than 'purpleray' or anything like that. I'm not sure who coined the term really, but somehow it stuck. From any sources i could find it only refers to the colour of the laser used to read/write the disks, which oddly is not blue.

Then again at that time you also had the hd-dvd format that used the exact same 405 nm wavelength but didn't really make it.

As things are though, optical disks are just on their way out, and sadly will become so obsolete that they will no longer be a viable source for nice single mode laser diodes in a few years.

It's sad for the hobby, but understandable from a marketing point of view: storage like (mirco) SD has become so cheap there no longer is any point in using dvd's or blu-ray discs. With problems like disc rot it's not that likely that optical discs will prove to be a suitable solution for very long term storage of information either. Sure, pressed CD's from the 80s/90s still play fine, but the recordable ones not so much.
 





Zach, I noticed you used what look to be 1/4 inch screws to hold the head to the heat sink and the two fans on the back. Are they those ones used primarily for wood? It doesn't seem from your photos to be working as well as screws threaded for metal. If so, I would reconsider how you hold all this together. Other than that, it looks like a great sink. You can drill and tap the threads to work with the philips screws that one normally sees for these things.
 
Paul, these are in fact sheet metal screws. The one isn't going in all the way in the photo due to the fin placement in the heatsink. I'm gonna need to re-drill that hole. The other 3 screws and the thermal glue are doing a good job as-is though. From what I can tell with the thermal camera

The fans I'm not as worried about. As long as they are stuck on, I'm happy with them
 
Oh, you used thermal adhesive to bond the head to the heat sink? That should work fine then. I was a bit concerned by that one screw that didn't look like it went all the way in. But, the thermal adhesive with the screws should keep the head from coming loose and you losing your sinking ability.
 
Well yeah, i suppose you could call the colour sort of 'pumpkin orange', though i'm not a big fan of naming colours really - just stating the wavelength is better and avoids confusion.

This isn't often a problem, though some vendors keep calling 405 nm 'blue' which it definitely is not. Then again they just had to name the intended device a bluray player, so yeah...
It's men in general that aren't precise naming colors.

Bluray sounds cooler and it rolls of the tongue easier that violetray. I did read long time ago why bluray was chosen.
 
I had to reread the thread. I thought the laser crystal was selenite. That would have been nice.
 
Machine screws with either a nut on the other side, or a tapped hole are ideal. Sheet metal, wood, drywall, or basically any other type of screw digs chunks into the base metal, and some of that metal will protrude upwards. This will often prevent a good seat of anything to a heat sink. Thermal adhesive alone that was clamped while it set would have been sufficient.
 
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It's men in general that aren't precise naming colors.

Bluray sounds cooler and it rolls of the tongue easier that violetray. I did read long time ago why bluray was chosen.

Men only see 16 colours as they often say. I'm not sure it's exactly that number, but it's probably close to that. Women name hundreds or colours if you give them the chance. There are some explanations for this, such as -some- women having tetrachromatic vision instead of the usual trichromatic, although this is a genetic thing that isn't that common.

I agree bluray sounds a lot better than violetray, but why name a standard by it's laser colour at all? We don't call dvd's red-ray either, i think hd-dvd was actually a better name, though not the winning standard in the end.

I doubt there will be another generation of optical drives with shorter wavelengths (say 300 nm or so), but if there would be, would we call it 'ultrabluray', 'uv-ray' or just something sensible like ultra-high density dvd (uhdd?)? I reckon probably something closer to the latter as it would be a product to be compatibel with the 4k (uhd) screens.
 
Very nice. Yeah I really like my orange lasers. There's something really fun and fire-y about them. Especially the HeNe orange at 612nm or so. It's a nice burning red-orange, where 607 is a little more of a bright orange crayon color, and 605 ish it starts to rapidly turn yellow. it's amazing how quickly the color transitions over about 10-15nm or so. It's quite rapid.
 
I don't have experience with the wavelengths around 600nm, but I do for the ones around 500nm. The color changes a lot here too in just a few nms.
 
Why not using TEC under head? You can make it more stable using constant temperature.
 
TECs aren't 100% efficient. He would still have to heat sink the other side of the TEC and it would need to remove even more heat than it does at the moment. TECs are a good idea when you need to control the temperature at a set point, but you always have to contend with more waste heat.
 
Honestly I'm happy with how the cooling is working for the head. I could have done better, such as sanding down the block a lot to make it perfectly flat (it is slightly concave against the head), relying more on the paste than the screws as cyparagon suggested... The head has built in TEC stabilization, so I'm not so sure it would help a lot . This solution was to dissipate the heat from the internal TEC.

PLUS... This is 100F (~38C) after 20 minutes on, which is really the longest I ever see myself leaving it on in one sitting. If I ever need it on longer, I'll probably invest in a much less sloppy solution
 
yeah, honestly just a small passive aluminum heatsink is probably enough. I doubt it generates much heat at all. as long as the baseplate is around 25-30C then it's fine. 40 is not unreasonable but starting to push it. I wouldnt let it get hotter than that.
 


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