Electrofreak is counting on one thing on this forum. That none of you know my history and that LPFers are not going to go dig for it. I've been helping laser hobbyists since 1992. I've been one since 1987. I've nearly gotten sued for publishing schematics and data more then once. I have not counted, and I care not, about post count, but I'm pretty sure I'm up there.
I've published a great deal of technical data, schematics and methods over the years. Openly and freely. I assure you it has cost me money, time and job prospects.
If you wish to do some digging go over to Google Groups, dig up alt.lasers
and search for Steve. A lot will also come up under
osr@uakron.edu and
osr@akrobiz.com
Then go over to the Laser FAQ and look at the credits section.
A bit of history. HIS STORY.
This is long ago, and there were no low cost Asian Lasers, the prototype red diodes needed LN2 cooling, only existed in two or three labs, and were 679 nm. CW IR diodes were just coming out. Laser Diodes that were actually for public sale at the time, are IR avalanche pulsed at 90 volts, the beam stays on only 2 nanoseconds, a few times per second. Certainly not a catalog item, either.
NO such thing as "public" internet, no web pages, but email was around if you were wealthy, or worked for academia or defense in computing. 9600 baud (~100 characters per second) was the idea of a fast data link. Only 300-1200 baud at home, over a phone line. Yes, I'm that old.
Closed loop Galvo sets were 2000-3000$ a pair, if you could find where to buy them. The best in the industry did what would be 14 Kpps today. Hobbyists were pretty much stuck with open loop, and very slow. PPS ratings were still a dream in the ILDA founding member's minds.
I've got a academic and professional history with lasers that started from a one sided obsessive, compulsive relationship with the red dot of a 1 mW hene in a science museum, two hours from home. I was 14 at the time. My father is deceased, or he would tell you how I begged, screamed, and seriously researched getting my hands on one. He would tell you he had to buy me a used glassblowing torch at 16, because if I could not get my hands on a tube, I was going to make one, or die trying.
I nearly did get cooked at one point, I rode the bike to the local neon shop to ask about vacuum and glass, and backed into a working bending burner. Drove home with a burnt sweater, but had a invite back, if I brought Dad.
Dad cut a deal for the glass, at what I now know was probably twice the market rate.
Thank you Walt, Rest in Peace, for the pound of 18 mm tubing, I still have some of it. You were sneaky Walt, when you did not sell me any electrodes. Sneaky was good, it forced me to improvise. Walt's suggesting on the backwards fridge compressor, only got me to maybe 80 torr, not low enough for lasing, but low enough to get a plasma. It was like a decade later before I had a real vacuum gauge. The glassblowing skill has been useful my whole life.
After seeing that first show and laser. It took me three more years to get my hands on my first laser. Hene at .1 mW, and that only happened because bar code systems brought the price of tubes down. There was a catch, to keep the price down, the laser was a kit, you had to solder about 180 components into the power supply board, your self. It took about 7 to 10 hours to do that. A four hundred dollar kit.
I still have the laser, it still runs, and it is still on the same little tube. I needed a "B" average for my junior year, in order for dad to buy it. Yes, I worked for a year to get my hands on that little laser. That had the desired effect, I really pulled my grades up in senior year.
Lasers were rare then, and expensive. A new factory 1mW hene tube, if ordering one piece, was 550$. Assembled, new hene PSUs would have been another 300$. A lab hene, 5-7 mW, was easily 900$. There was no internet, and email was a rare thing, reserved for scientists, the government and a few big corporations. It really was not email. It was time share access on a terminal. You had to go hunt down your mail as a file. Data on where to buy lasers came from trade magazines and a few printed catalogs, and unless you worked for a optics company or defense contractor, you had to go to a university library to find the magazines.
There were only two companies that regularly sold used laser parts, to the public, but you needed to find their ad in the back of a trade magazine. Both of their catalogs were four xeroxed pages, mailed to you after a phone call, usually with no pictures, just a description.
The lasers were not really used, that was a ruse. In reality the company owner placed a order for several thousand HENE tubes a year, unmarked, and probably untested, so he could get the cost down. A great deal of them were rejected for minor cosmetic reasons, or were trade ins, from when they hit one year of operation.
The 20 mW Argon you get on Ebay now for 70-200$ was 3500$, USED for 25-50 mW in that catalog. Cabling and fans extra, of course. New price if you were buying 10 or more was ~7500$ each.
I have the price lists some place to back all that up.
Nothing with lasers was well documented. You really had to work at a university or big company to get accurate data on how to do anything laser.
This lack of hardware data was maddening for some one so obsessed with lasers. The high school library was a joke, with regards to technology. I would pedal the bike 15 miles each way to the university technical library to read the laser section and "Laser Focus" magazine. High school freshman were not supposed to be on campus, period. The librarian was supposed to kick me out, for being under age, but she smiled and let me pass. After all, I was NOT there to talk, and I did put the books back on the shelf.
The physics professor would let me see the big hene, but not handle it, nor be exposed to the beam. I'm sure the chemistry professor with the big argon wondered why there were often nose prints on the window to his lab.
A professional Laserist at the planetarium, still two hours away, is tired of me asking questions, so he has me call the company that makes the galvos. They send a data book with basic theory and a shockingly expensive price list. It took me four or more years to find a pair I could afford. That first pair was open loop, and by today's standards, did 2-3 kpps. This was not really a problem, because there was NO computer to drive them. I had to build analog oscillators to make Lissajous patterns.
Looking under the hood of the planetarium projector is impossible, it gets covered over with a black cloth before the lights come back up. Think more secret then the SR-71 blackbird's replacement. There were 64 images, 2D stills, 256 points, stored in hand burned eprom chips, and it only took seven or eight years after first seeing the show to learn it was called "ZAP", software.
Just after high school, I'm at the university.The librarian is not shocked at all when I come in.
I badly wanted a argon, but could NOT find any data on a real one. Lots of theory, lots of rough sketches in books, but no hard operational data. No touring that chem lab, forbidden.
Dad decides I need a upgrade from the TRS-80 computer. A 286 Pentium, probably 40 Mhz, appears. Costs 2500$ and kills a motherboard every three months. Thank God for the replacement warranty.
This leads to a big interest in the university computing resources. Hey kid, you do not need to stay in the library all night copying the new "shareware" disks on 5.25" floppies, go home and get a modem.
1200 baud, dialup, whooohooo. Joy! But it just connects me to the same lousy university server, and no outside world.
Ok, have modem, need a ISP. What the heck can you do, not much of a internet yet, but dial up BBS is still big.
Now we are a bit further along, I have a ISP. You pay 20$ a month to dial in from home, and it is far less restrictive then the BBS or the university server.
Get first laser job, minimum wage, pulling cables mostly, but allowed into the laser booth for hardware lessons. Model 171s, 20+ watts of argon and 7 of krypton. Get a 14 hour lesson from the factory tech on how to do everything. He doesn't care, he's billing 700$ a day plus travel to install two tubes at 13,700$ each. After three months, get myself fired. Easy enough to do on ones first real job that is not fast food.
I ended up calling a company that rebuilt tubes, The company president sent me a bare tube, for free, a little 20 milliwatt Cyonics. (now JDSU). One glitch, NO power supply.
Hum, 700-1500$ for a used argon supply was the norm back then, There were NO published schematics. I was a college student, and thus no money.
All the money working a in fast food place went to my books, and gas costs. No scholarship, either, I did it the hard way.
I knew it was a constant current source, but all the little details were missing. How do you start the plasma without frying the electronics? Not obvious. Oh wait, how much current, how much cathode. Not published, and no one is talking. The factory keeps sending me nice brochures, but no answers.
Meeting another laser rebuilder in the chat, He cut me a deal. I repair 25 printer modulators with bad crystals, and teach his guys how to do it, he'll send me a working ION PSU, with "issues" that prevented it from going back into the 300,000$ copier/printer. But no schematic, that was still a trade secret.
He took the chance that I could find a way to rebond the gold wires on the crystal, which his engineers could not. I did find a way, one special solder alloy, that would not dissolve the fine gold bond wires. That took quite a bit of time in the three libraries and on the bench.
His engineers, happy with my work, tossed in a freshly rebuilt 60X, without telling him. If they would have not done that, I had no way to hook the Cyonics to the Gold Box. No cable pinouts had ever been published.
I find a startup laser software vendor in a magazine ad.
He suggests I call a certain Canadian Laserist who hosts gatherings of Laserists. That fellow teaches me about IRC chat, because international phone bills are killer. AT&T ran the whole county then, no competition, and billing was by the minute plus a factor for the distance the call went.
Sam Goldwasser, met in a newsgroup on the Internet, was starting a little text file on HENE lasers, and we started trading notes.
I'm allowed to do my first road trip alone. Canada. Laser lessons. Border crossing lessons, and a early introduction to 25% taxes. I slept on a floor in the electronics lab. Said laserist is writing the only book ever published on how to do laser shows, would I read the draft while I'm there?. ChaChing!!!
Some more horse trading and paying a lot of money to attend a laser conference in Toronto (six hour drive, share a motel room with 2 others, fix cold sandwiches in room)
That expensive trip resulted in a copier owner sending me a brown envelope in the mail, with no return address. He was happy because I helped him with a cooling problem on his projector. It was a three foot by four foot schematic, which made it nearly impossible to copy, unless redrawn.
So hey Sam, here is some argon data, on how to make the rare cable, which was 250$ from the used laser folks, add that to your file. Actual cable parts cost, then, 40$
Alignment of the cavity optics was a real tightly held piece of information. See, that was a 700 a day service call, and not all customers got the "good" manual explaining it. I'm not the first to publish that technique, but I'm probably one of the first on the net. Sam starts up the FAQ and I have a venue to publish a bit.
I tried to do things ethically, very little of what I posted was a blatant copy, most was a hint without really infringing on rights, but coming close to the line. I tried to work out what was really going on, and make measurements, and post that, instead of just copying.
About a year later I got permission to post the schematics for another Argon PSU, one that was very common in surplus, but had been replaced by a newer model. They are still out there and running.
Go look at the post date for the early internet DPSS 532 green technical info, guess whom was one of the first????
The rest is history. I start finding where the used parts are. Large chapters of the FAQ get wrote. Sharing of interests happens to get data. Suffice it to say I published a lot of schematics and methods, and shared a lot of what I learned, and I learned from others. I got into a fair amount of trouble for publishing some of that stuff. One the other hand much of it was fun.
Lets get up to modern day here. I have probably spend 10,000$++ on my own lasers in 20 years. The return on the investment is marginal, in terms of cash.
I am no prophet, I leave that to the designated, chosen ones, my personal Lord and Savior picks. I deeply resent the remark. Normally I would turn the other cheek, with regards to Electrofreak's "baiting" me.
However, if you are so inclined, do some digging of twenty years of helping laser hobbyists and professionals and students, often at the risk of my personal career. Yeah, there have been a few scandalous things over the years. That is part of being human.
Go look at my track record and the overall signal to noise ratio in my posts and discussions. Dig back some years. Google and Yahoo have archived at least back to 1999 or so. It will take you twenty-thirty minutes of searching. Go see how much data I have posted. Go see how many questions I have answered. GO see that a lot of those say let me get back to you on that, it will take a few days to look it up, or for me to call some one who knows.
Then decide what you wish to believe about my being "Anti Hobbyist".
Then some day ask me about the injuries I have, the people I know who have retinal burns. Ask about a friend who was badly burned on a three phase PSU, nearly loosing a limb. Ask about another friend who has a back injury from lifting a laser. Ask about the local technician who died working on a medical laser system, taking a whole year to pass away, slowly, painfully. You might just understand why I worry about safety and repercussions of a technology advancing faster then society can adapt to it.
BTW, I am by no means the first laser hobbyist. There are others who go back LONG before me. Their writings are rare, because there were few mediums in which to publish. Some did find ways of doing so. Most of them built the tubes from scratch, or polished ruby rods by hand.
I don't expect any one to be "awed" by any of this, but I felt the need to defend myself a bit.
This has nothing to do with being the "Premier" anything. Electrofreak has a bunch of scores he wants to settle.
Cold Shadow, you may feel free to yank my account at any time.
Steve.
