Recent content by Pieznice29

I got a 40W CO2 laser from ColeTech a while back on eBay. Shipping was relatively quick to the UK and packing was reasonable. The only problem I've had with it so far is the small flexible plastic pipes that join the bore coolant jacket to the mirror jackets, one cracked and fell off during...

I've tried this before with my laser, I find it is absorbed too well. All 40~watts ends up being absorbed by such a small volume of water most of it just boils away and takes the heat with it. I can imagine it working well if a beam expander was used to distribute the light across the surface...

The diameter of those pipe fittings leads me to believe this can't just be a 20mw HeNe. Looks like it was designed for a very high flow rate, like something I would expect to find on a CO2 laser. (Although there isn't really much to go off for scale)

Ha, I was thinking exactly that... bobhaha, where are you getting your 9 lenses from? I assume you arn't going to buy 9 of those webcams and pull them out. I can't find anywhere that will sell them in singles or cheaply, then again, I havent looked in a while.

Huh, didn't know they even had a 5v output. Unless you mean 3.3v, in which case 20mA doesn't seem right since i've seen GPS receivers running from an iPhone before...

I'm assuming you want to make your own laser pointer from a bare diode. I don't think you should depend on the output current limit of the iPod. For a start, all iPods are slightly different and all have different current limits on the 3.3v output, as far as I know. Just to be safe, I would...

I've done this quite a few times on accident, followed by on purpose... I find that if I heat up a tiny spot on thin glass like that of a lightbulb for a few seconds with my 40W CO2 laser, the whole thing spontaniously shatters after a minute or 2 or cooling down. If you watch closely (with...

That's pretty damn cheap if it means getting my hands on a liquid lens, might just have to buy one of those when I get a chance. Thanks for the link.

It would be hard to implement, but it would be useful for say a computer controlled laser that needed automatic focusing or something along those lines... @532 with Envy I'd like to play around with one, I can't think of many actual uses for it though, so I can't really justify the cost of...

Thanks, I noticed after I didn't use the embed link but didn't have time to fix it.

Not sure if this has been posted before, according to a quick search it hasn't... Just discovered these magical little devices called liquid lenses. They have the ability to vary their focal length continously over a given range. The focal length is adjusted by changing the driving voltage into...

Woah, I never got the notification email telling me I had more replies... Sorry for the slow reply everyone. Unfortunately I have lost interest in nitrogen lasers, have been fairly busy recently and haven't had much chance to play around with them. I'll have another go at it some time soon, I...

Yep, thats right. You could probably get away with half-wave and a capacitor, but full-wave with a capacitor would be the best to avoid the laser pulsing on and off 50 or 25 times a second. (depending on which country you live in)

Don't worry, I've done my homework ;) (Or at least some of it...) From what I understand, due to the lasing process happening so fast and being so short, I need to dump as much energy as possible into the nitrogen as I can from my capacitor in that time. Any stray inductance and resistance needs...

Thanks Tech_Junkie, you've reminded me I need to keep up with the times :p Never seen stuff like that before... The beam width of the output of a CO2 laser doesn't really change much over the distances used in these applications, so the focus is pretty much spot on for the entire cutting area...