Recent content by Johnyz

I'd say, for best heat properties, if this ever gets mass produced, aluminum core PCB's would be preferrable. Plus, they come with a nice white solder mask. Also, not sure if completely relevant, but I recently open sourced the source code that I made for the TriniDrive on my GitHub page, so if...

The Practical Laser Driver Theory Greetings everybody, it seems I'm back after a quite long hiatus. Anyway, during my pause, I realised how much info I have gathered when I was working on my driver designs back in the day and I'd like to write it down somewhere, just because. Greetings to...

It really depends on the type of the battery as well. E.g. when I was soldering to a coin cell (yes I was an idiot) the voltage dropped to 0.08V when it was still hot.

I got mine a long time ago - I'll post results when I test it with the 18650 Larry sells.

I just finished testing the driver and it works so... Let's revive this! At the time I designed it, my buck design was finished, so I used this, since LM3410 can work as a bad buck... Sort of. Adding one 1N400x in series to the red LD would be good.

Just a bit of info, but a true coma usually (90%) does not last more than a couple of weeks. "After this time, some patients gradually come out of the coma, some progress to a vegetative state, and others die." (Wikipedia)

Regarding that... I built a true buck driver with LM3405 and I am actually running it in my 635. It puts out around 600mA and I am getting .5W with it with no measurable heating with a single li-ion. But then you came along with your AMC linear sink driver and I was... out of market. :beer: I...

EDIT: Stupid me... Mosquioes are 445nm... I thought they were 635nm. Sorry :D

I'm running mine at around 600mA on a custom LM3405 buck driver and getting around 500mW. I did it before RHD started selling these 1A kits and everyone was careful with them back then. It still happily lases.

I know, but that looks like less than 6 mils to me. Maybe it's because of its size, nevermind.

WOW! That looks AWESOME! Where did you get these PCB's from?

One more thing: does Dorkbot really allow for such tight spacing between traces?

Well, I added OVP after killing three of them because of mistakes during testing. The highest risk of the diode dying is when you are stuffing 1.8A into a 445... That is two $5 drivers. But the thing that matters is that you will need to put in new drivers. That means not only unsoldering the...

About that OVP thing - I have it in my design, it's really simple, you just add a Zener diode in reverse (I'm using 12V breakdown and 300mW heat dissipation) and an appropriate resistor (I'm using 100 ohm). When the driver is run without load, the IC boosts the voltage all the way to 12V, where...

I don't think that the brightness difference between the laser colors is really improtant. Here's a photo I took yesterday during a snowfall. (It was much more amazing in person :) ) Now, that's a 1W 445, 400mW 532 and a 500mW 637. Unless you want to combine the colors into a perfect white...