400mW RED Prototype

[Junktronix]

junktronix: arctos don't glue their stuff down - it's all lined up with these super fine adjust mounts. Ours has gone out of alignment a few times - we found out that our 10mm baseplate wasn't exactly flat as when we bolted down the arctos it would go out of alignment.

We've also found heat causes alignment issues.

That's good to know. Here is a quick picture of how I'm combining my 2 200mW maXYZ red lasers



The mount at 45 degrees will have a mirror attached and has adjustment screws in 3 corners so the beam can be aimed at exactly 90 degrees into the cube. The cube gets mounted to the MM-1 and can be rotated and tilted to compensate for any difference in the height of the 2 beams. I can't some up with a way to get perfect alignment with less than these 5 adjustments (unless the beams from both lasers are *exactly* the same height. Next I get to align this with the green and blue lasers - fun, fun, fun.

[aijii]

I've found that if you design it right, aligning multiple lasers isn't so hard...

[aijii]

but then again - the more things you have to align, the more things you have that can go out of alignment

[LaserLover]

Hi aijii

So you've got an Arctos projector and from what you say alignment can be a problem due to heat and flexing of the baseplate (the optic bench upon which all the components are mounted). This tells me to make sure I have a rigid breadboard when i build my next DPSS projector.
If you had to realign the Arctos projector then you cracked it open.
It would be interesting to see some pictures of what's under the hood.
Which model of Arctos projector do you have and are all the lasers DPSS or do they use Laser diodes for the red ?

Rick

[aijii]

no, we have an arctos red laser module. not projector.

They use their own red and blue (violet) diode based lasers in their projectors these days, with green dpss..

[buffo]

Isn't the Arctos red laser actually a hybrid DPSS design that lases at 671 nm? I thought I read something about thier design - uses some sort of special optical fiber as one of the stages??? Supposed to give really good beam quality too...

I'm sure they sell other lasers, but I thought the "arctos red" name referred specifically to this dpss laser?

[aijii]

Nope. Arctos Red is just multiple 658nm diodes combined together, and then TEC cooled to give approximately 650nm...

5 diodes in our 540mw (more like 590mw) red. up to 36 diodes in the 3+ watt bad boys... what a headfuck that would be to align!

[Spec]

Isn't the Arctos red laser actually a hybrid DPSS design that lases at 671 nm? I thought I read something about thier design - uses some sort of special optical fiber as one of the stages??? Supposed to give really good beam quality too...

I'm sure they sell other lasers, but I thought the "arctos red" name referred specifically to this dpss laser?

Heres a drawing taken from their german patent. 8 diodes, nasty optics

Beam quality is absolutely terrible but to be expected since they are just sandwiching beams next to each other and on top of each other where the laws of physics allow.



Pretty neat setup as there are no known ways to combine more than 2 beams into one singular line.

[LaserLover]

I've heard of but never seen a fiber optic device called a " Star Coupler" that has one input and multiple outputs that fanout .
I wonder If it's possible to connect a Star Coupler backwards in order to combine multi[ple lasers into one output and what the coupling efficiencies might be ?
Typical star coupler would be for telecom so optimized for 1550 nM W.L.
Has anyone ever heard of this device before ?

Rick

[aijii]

It would be rather trivial to align one laser into the star coupler, to give x outputs.. but would be lots of fun for the whole family to align it so that it worked backwards !