Recent content by tefeari

Can anyone give me the definitions for the following laser terminology? These tend to be used on datasheets and I can't seem to find much discussion / use of them elsewhere: - Parallel Beam Divergence - Perpendicular Beam Divergence I'm pretty sure these give some kind of half angle for the...

Bluefan: Can you recommend any online resources for calculating the CW and pulsed MPE? Most references I find to such numbers often point to expensive offline books (in the many hundreds of dollars range). ShortyInCanada: In my experience a 1/3 duty cycle essentially makes a light source...

That feels a bit oversimplified. This is a 15 mW laser not a 15 mJ laser. A LED pulsed at such a rate is going to need drastically less heatsinking for itself as the heating/cooling process is nonlinear. Similarly, the damage from such a laser would be thermal in nature, and 10ms would give the...

So let's say we take a 15 mw laser pointer and modulate it at 60 hz with 5ms on and 10 ms off (33% duty cycle), is it now as safe as a 5mw laser?

If a laser has a duty cycle of something like 33%, does that mean that in terms of eye safety it is equivalent to a non-pulsed laser with 1/3 of the total power? To make things simpler, let's assume that the laser doesn't pulse at insane rates (let's say less than 200 hz) nor does it pulse for...

How safe/dangerous are line lasers? Let's take 100mw to be the example output power. Let's also suppose the laser is spread out using a lens (or some other standard optical piece that is used for non-scanning line lasers). If a 5mw dot laser is the safety threshold with a spot size of 1cm...