(no subject)
Nov. 13th, 2017 08:01 pmTrader Joe's was closing these out so I got one for a friend.
On our way to a birthday brunch, we found a trout subaru.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
threemeninaboat said "hey, I want a laser that can burn holes in things, that I can hold." I said "that's a terrible idea" and built one.
It uses one of our LED driver chips to regulate current. I made a little handpiece with a formed-in heatsink that the copper laser module presses into, with some heatsink grease in there. The switch on the handpiece toggles the LED driver enable, so it only turns on when pushed. In retrospect I should have used a microswitch with a stronger spring: it takes little pressure to turn it on, so putting it down hastily so it sits on the switch is sufficient. The laser is from a bluray, two watts of blue, which is sufficient to permanently blind you even if it bounces off a non-flat surface across the room, hence the groovy blue glasses.
Here I am trying exactly that downstairs.
10 meters away where it's shining on the wall it's diverged out to a beam width of maybe 20cm. I learned when testing it in the mad scientist hut that when it gets below about 5mm, even at that distance, plywood immediately smokes.
Yes, this is the one I use sometimes to eliminate wasps that are trying to make nests at the peak of the Mad Scientist Hut, where I can't reach them.
On our way to a birthday brunch, we found a trout subaru.
threemeninaboat said "hey, I want a laser that can burn holes in things, that I can hold." I said "that's a terrible idea" and built one.It uses one of our LED driver chips to regulate current. I made a little handpiece with a formed-in heatsink that the copper laser module presses into, with some heatsink grease in there. The switch on the handpiece toggles the LED driver enable, so it only turns on when pushed. In retrospect I should have used a microswitch with a stronger spring: it takes little pressure to turn it on, so putting it down hastily so it sits on the switch is sufficient. The laser is from a bluray, two watts of blue, which is sufficient to permanently blind you even if it bounces off a non-flat surface across the room, hence the groovy blue glasses.
Here I am trying exactly that downstairs.
10 meters away where it's shining on the wall it's diverged out to a beam width of maybe 20cm. I learned when testing it in the mad scientist hut that when it gets below about 5mm, even at that distance, plywood immediately smokes.
Yes, this is the one I use sometimes to eliminate wasps that are trying to make nests at the peak of the Mad Scientist Hut, where I can't reach them.
