Thought I’d share my Solarfire low cost high end (beam quality) 445nm build.
The goal behind this build was simplicity, high stability and good low divergent beam at ultra low cost. The concept allows DIY, if necessary, with just a hack saw, file, 3mm hand Tap and hand drill. I got the aluminum base plate (40mm x 100mm x 6mm alu. flat bar) and aluminum rectangular tubing (W40mm x L80mm x T4mm x H27mm) precut for next to nothing at a local metal working shop. The diode mount is also home made out of a piece of 15mm x 15mm x 22mm Aluminum square rod drilled with a 10,7mm hole for the 405-G-2 lens + a 4mm hole for the NTC and a 3mm threaded hole for the set screw. Total cost was about 10$ for the housing materials, 100$ for optics and diode, 12$ for the TEC.
Diode mount, optics and carrier plates out of 25mm x 15mm x 8mm are all glued to insure a non tension build. There are only 4 x 3mm x 40mm screws necessary to put the whole thing together. I printed out 1:1 templates of the build with drill, mount and optics positions and used double sided carpet tape to affix the template to the base plate. The template can easily be made with almost any kind of CAD or paint/draw software, this allows a preview of proper component positioning. This is much easier and faster than manually transferring measurements to the base plate. Positions for the mount were transferred by cutting thru the template with a razorblade. After removing the template paper and tape from the base plate the fine lines that resulted from the razorblade make it easy for gluing the mount in place.
Specs:
Type: Single 445nm selected diode doing 1285mW@1000mA raw output.
Running @ 1100mA outputting 1200mW
Optical efficiency: 84.67% thru put
Precision analog modulation up to 300 kHz
Beam: 3.5mm x 3.5mm @ aperture,
3.5mm x 10mm @ 11m (Can be adjusted to 10mm x 10mm but I prefer the 3.5mm x 10mm with the head mounted @ 45° in the projector outputting the beam diagonal like this \ )
Aperture height 19mm
Divergence 0.68mrad
A visually very sharp, cutting edge beam.
Optics: 405-G-2 collimation with cylinder correction (drlava): drlavas’ lens gives excellent results in combination with short FL lens. A little more challenging to setup than prisms, but here a much lower divergence is possible.
Housing: base plate: 40mm x 100mm x 6mm aluminum flat bar
Sides: 40mm x 80mm x 4mm aluminum rectangular tube 27mm long
Top: 40mm x 80mm x 10mm profiled aluminum heat sink.
Total weight 233g
Thermal management: TEC/Heat sink, heating/cooling (Optional 40mm fan). TEC is on top of the diode mount, sandwiched between diode mount and heat sink, which also is the lid of the laser. If there’s proper ventilation of the projector, there’s no need for the optional 40mm fan. Laser head is top dissipating (thermal-flow-direction-oriented) leads heat away from the optics, carriers and base plates.
As soon as we get the Solarfire-n-ice V2 finished, it will be used for this head in combination with an Analog 300 kHz @ 3000mA diode driver. I will probably combine the 2 on one PCB.
More to come when the electronic hardware is finished.
I had to hurry with the farfield pics because the laser started to burn holes into the measuring grid @ 11m.