Meet "Big Red"

Well, after months of work, several prototypes and a near divorce experience :D I have finally half finished "Big Red". Now he's looking presentable I have persuaded him to model for a couple of pics.

He is currently sporting 8 Opnext HL6545MG diodes running at 230mA per diode and at 5.04v produces 1300mW with a 3mm beam and under 1.6mrad divergence, and he loves Robin Bowden's Die4Drive drivers (thanks for all your help Robin :) )
He is only half finished. Opposite his current array he'll be getting another 8 diodes and will end up pushing almost double that out of the business end. More pictures to follow as he evolves.

Beam spot pic @ 27m:

http://www.hilogic.co.uk/las/br06.jpg

Inside:

http://www.hilogic.co.uk/las/br01.jpg

http://www.hilogic.co.uk/las/br03.jpg

http://www.hilogic.co.uk/las/br02.jpg

http://www.hilogic.co.uk/las/br08.jpg

Holy fuck! That shouldn't be legal! I want one.... :0

Hell Simon!!, that is NICE :D

The beam quality looks good too, almost gaussian. Can't wait to see the 2.6Watt version ;)

Are you taking orders yet?

Cheers

Jem

very nice mate .

Woweee! I'm only 7 diodes, 8 lenses and 7 die4drive pcbs behind you then :D

You are fucking crazy!

http://www.technfun.com/smilies/icon_worship.gif

Kinda blows "small footprint" out that window though huh? ;) Very Nice! You just wait tillmarconi gets off his couch... :eek: >:)

oh

I take one of that into my 3W rgb scanner :D

That was a sweet setup !!
very very nice..


You do the same with blue ? :D

price ?

Hmmm... I'm confused. How are you getting a 3 mm beam diameter at the outlet of that thing when you're combining 8 beams together. Are you aligning them in a circular arrangement with those mm1's? (A picture of the spot as it exits the projector would be helpful...) How much overlap (and thus loss) is there?

Also, what is the beam diameter coming out of each individual diode? And do you have correcting optics somewhere in the beam path downstream of the mirrors?

I've seen several takes on this idea, but I've never heard of anything with such a small beam diameter. It's one hell of an accomplishment though.

Details -details!

Adam

I must say Adam said it best, I would really like to know how it was done all within 3mm. Please share more.

Top Banana Simon.
Cant wait to see this in action on Feb 3rd - and to have a peek inside....
I will second a previous comment - Blue! Blue! Blue!
Lets hope blue di diodes come into the realms of reality soon (ie <$$$$$)


Rob

BTW I take it from the images that you are stacking 4 outputs next to each other twice and then putting these two, one on top of each other. I am also guessing that these are all set to one polarisation and the next 8 will be a mirror of this, save the diodes at 90 degrees to these. Then PBS and WATTS.

:)

Cool M8

Rob

Wow,

Very nice... A lot of very hard work gone into this project... Would look lovely in my RGB which is still currently a pile of bits at the moment :mad:

Good work Simon, can't wait to see that blowing up the dancefloor in a club..

Damn, that almost looks like an Arctos project! Nice neat layout. Do you have a good source for those Opnext diodes? How'd you collimate them so well in those small packages. As Adam said "Details" Please!! And P/Ns, sources on the housings/ optics so we can all have some fun:D
Awesome Dude!

Ok, to answer some questions/comments;

>Are you taking orders yet?
I'll not be manufacturing as it's a hell of a lot of work and there's potential copyright issues.

>You do the same with blue?
Could do, if the diodes weren't so f***ing expensive >:)

>Are you aligning them in a circular arrangement
Nope, as Rob pointed out they are in 2 rows of 4 similar to this:

0000
0000

>How much overlap (and thus loss) is there?
Very little due to overlap, not measured but I'd guess less than 5%

>what is the beam diameter coming out of each individual diode?
2.5mm x 1.8mm

>And do you have correcting optics somewhere in the beam path downstream of the mirrors?
Yes there are more collimating optics

>Kinda blows "small footprint" out that window though huh?
He's big, but not too big. For scale, the flexture mounts are only 10mm square, and the whole thing is 100mm wide by (IIRC) 220mm long. You wouldn't want him dropped on your toes though as the baseplate is milled from 19mm ally :eek:

>Do you have a good source for those Opnext diodes? How'd you collimate them so well in those small packages. As Adam said "Details" Please!! And P/Ns, sources on the housings/ optics
Big Red's housing, flexture mounts and diode block were made by me. The suppliers: diodes from Photonic-products, eBay for the cheap 1st surface "trapezoid" mirrors and Philips for the collimators.

As you may have realised, there's more to Big Red than is shown in the pictures. I'm aware there's a few companies doing similar, and as I don't want to tread on anyone's toes (and get my ass chewed as a result) so please understand my reluctance to discuss the finer details in an open forum.
He's not perfect, there's still a couple of issues that need to be addressed, but I thought you would all be interested to see what's possible.

Cool! Thanx:)...............................