Just an update. I got another of these lasers recently. it has an earlier ID and is the OEM version so it lacks a shutter on the front. It has about 2700 hours on it, so it is a bit more well used than the other and the internals are ever so slightly different, and a bit less modular. overall its pretty much identical though aside from the labeling on the outside though. This includes different stickers saying its an OEM product rather than CDRH compliant on its own, along with some other minor differences.
I also obtained two more drivers-an OEM one, and another scientific one like shown in the original post. The OEM one has some minor scratches on the analog daughter board, and some resistors missing from it where the scratches are, so they probably were scraped off in an accident somewhere along the line. the main board boots up fine however and runs perfectly, and reports 0 hours and has a pass sticker on it so I suspect it was produced, had something happen to it in storage and then never got sold after initial testing however due to the flaw. the other driver also works, and interestingly has a different analog board with lots of extra components on it, and an extra connector. it appears to reverse one of the DIP switches- S1,4 which is responsible for auto-booting the controller on power-up, rather than waiting for an RS-232 command to start the laser. The second driver (the scientific one) is also reporting 0 hours on it, suggesting (as they came from the same place) that they were spare stock that has recently been sold off/recovered, but functionally are new, despite being a bit roughed up. Everything works great for the price and is probably worth quite a lot of money. Since the second scientific controller is a spare I decided to peek into it more in depth than the other one, and found that the 12V supply SP picked out for this laser is a KGCOMP model SPN50-12S which is a 12V 4.3A supply (on 115Vin) designed for low noise and fairly high efficiency at 78%. Looks like a good choice overall and seems to hold up nicely. Also reinforces just how much less power it consumes than the coherent sapphire does. even the modern sapphire driver is rated 140W, compared to the 50W of this supply, and I know it doesn't even use that much, having plenty of headroom under most all conditions.
Pics to be added at a later time
