Taking apart the WL Core...

[Smeerworst]

Very nice! Looks sweet :beer:

Thank you for getting me started at this

yes i think it came out nice and maybe the first polished core for as far i know ever made with led mod ^^

 

[hwang21]

No problem. This also proves that a WL Core can be modded to burn things... I can easily smoke leather with the raw IR diode

 

[hwang21]

I figured the optics out. You only need two lenses, a (what seems to be, at least... I'm half guessing. The optic is about 1mm thick so it's kinda hard to say what the heck it is. The entire thing is translucent except for a tiny bead at the very center, about 1mm across) beam expander and a collimating lens. I hot glued the beam expander right onto the module, then used the provided threading to screw the collimating lens in line with the laser beam. A bit of fiddling with the distance between the beam expander and the collimating lens and voila, a focused IR dot ~1 inch from the aperture. The driver+diode assembly is a bit more fragile than I expected, the laser only works half the time now for some reason but when it works, I get a full 210mW of focused IR light, all from a 5mW Core! I am impressed at the success, my DIY skills are quite nonexistent (more due to never having tried than anything else, but first time success? lucky me)