{"id":305,"date":"2011-10-01T22:48:19","date_gmt":"2011-10-01T22:48:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/?p=305"},"modified":"2011-10-12T01:32:32","modified_gmt":"2011-10-12T01:32:32","slug":"playing-with-dvd-rw-laser-diodes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/2011\/10\/playing-with-dvd-rw-laser-diodes\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing with DVD RW Laser Diodes"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve always wanted to extract laser diodes from DVD RW and Blu ray drives and play around with them. After killing a few lasers I finally got one working!<\/p>\n

The laser diode I found doesn’t have a housing, it’s just the bare diode.<\/p>\n

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Inside the DVDRW it’s housed within a heatsink. I guess it’s fairly important that these things are dissipate heat! I extracted the diode and soldered on some cables. I then attached it up to my power supply. I set the voltage at 3v and current limited to 100mA. Current limiting is fairly important it seems as it’s easy to burn these things out. I went for 3v to be safe, but I understand you can drive them up to 9v.<\/p>\n

In the picture below you can just about see the laser emission.<\/p>\n

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Here’s the complete setup, with my power supply.<\/p>\n

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Usually people buy a Aixiz laser module which contains a collimating lens to focus the laser. I’m a bit too cheap to buy on at the moment, and I’ve discovered that many DVDRWs contain a collimating lens which I can play with anyway.<\/p>\n

Here’s a optical block from a Sony DVDRW:<\/p>\n

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Behind the mirror which reflects the light in to the focusing lens is a collimating lens. I removed the mirror (and the focusing lens parts) and dremeled away the metal that was blocking the path of the collimating lens.<\/p>\n

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This produced a reasonable point from a few feet away:<\/p>\n

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You can also remove the collimating lens and use it with a laser diode directly. You’ll need to figure out how to mount it though (probably better than me):<\/p>\n

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Other notes<\/h2>\n

I’ve dug another laser diode out of a LG lightscribe drive. Here it is:<\/p>\n

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I’ve always wanted to extract laser diodes from DVD RW and Blu ray drives and play around with them. After killing a few lasers I finally got one working! The laser diode I found doesn’t have a housing, it’s just the bare diode. Inside the DVDRW it’s housed within a heatsink. I guess it’s fairly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-lasers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1RRoU-4V","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":428,"href":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions\/428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/41j.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}