Betsy - my first RGB projector

[polishedball]

Attachment 19312
46 M4 & M5 holes, drilled and tapped! Now what am I going to do with this drill press?

Next steps:
Wire up ILDA connector
Power connections
Safety features
Variance application!

Mike

Nice! can;t wait to get started on a case.

[blowfly]

Make that 47 holes. I decided to place the interlock shutter now while I can still get the plate on the drill press... last hole, I promise.

Mike

[DjHeadie]

hah nice! good to see you got those all finished, and good to know you have a drill press! i was scrambling trying to find one last week, ended up solving my issue thank god!


anyways, lookin good mike! i also have a small fogger you can borrow. the amount a decent hazer costs is not worth it just for... beam shots

[blowfly]

Betsy is online! I'm totally psyched. Last night I mounted everything, built this temporary connections board, plugged in my new FB3... and she ran like a champ right out of the gate! Some pics below.

Yeah if anyone area Seattle needs to use a drill press let me know.





Later,
Mike

[dstar]

I think, there is a little much space between the heads and groundplate.
His name is Heatsink.

[ElektroFreak]

Depending on the power of those heads and the duration of the shows the OP will be running they should be fine. Most lower-powered heads have sufficient heatsinking to run for several hours or more in a climate-controlled environment. The TECs in the head keep everything that matters at a constant temperature, but in very hot environments the high temps can cause the TEC control circuitry to run away, overloading the circuit, which usually causes the emergency interlock to shut down the laser to protect it.

[dstar]

I think the BlueHead will work, but produce after xx minutes much more IR and less blue.
Temperature drift at the crystals. Although dual TEC.
The Head has only 1cm² contact with plate, an it is freeair in a nearly closed room.

[ElektroFreak]

Don't get me wrong, having the base of the head in full contact with the baseplate is ideal, but the OP should be able to run like that for the vast majority of shows so long as they're not being run continuously in the heat for hours on end..

[dstar]

The Problem is, to hold this Heads on constant Temperatur. Not over-heating.
The TEC works to, hmm, strong. The crystal temperature varies much.
So you have never the optimum.

Messure the power after a reflecting yellow dichro.
Your original 250mW will be only 120-150mW CW @ 473nm after some minutes.
The diode produce the same power, but the crystal can not convertet IR to blue.

[ElektroFreak]

Disagree. I have a 100mW CNI 473nm IR filtered head here that I just ran 2 nights ago on my wood workbench. No heatsink. After I was done with it it was making pretty much precisely the same amount of blue as it was once it stabilized after powering on. I had it on for about 45 minutes which was enough time for the case to reach a little over ambient temperature. I've run many other lasers on my workbench and have never noticed any abnormal instability other than tiny changes on overall behavior vs. the same lasers on baseplates. The whole point of TEC stabilization is to keep things more-or-less level over as wide a range of ambient temps as possible, heatsinking or not, up to a point at which the TEC drive circuitry is overloaded. While the TEC drive circuit does work harder, in my experience the critical side of the TEC should NOT vary much from the temperature the control circuitry is trying to maintain. Having TEC stabilization is not a cure-all, and not having the module on a heatsink introduces a duty-cycle in hot environments to avoid possible damage, which is why even low-powered modules are best placed on a baseplate. If you have a module that displays large amounts of instability with temp. variations there may be a problem with the module. Of course this is all just my own personal experience and I'm not a scientist, I'm just telling it as I understand things to be.

As I said previously, full contact with the baseplate is ideal and greatly preferred, but one can get away without doing so when using lower-powered lasers in environments that aren't too hot. Outside in summer? Absolutely not.