Quick question about where to solder a wire.

[FlutterPie]

I bought laser supplies to make a laser projector and I would have never been able to put it together without the help of a fellow member on here cfavreau. He is a really great guy and he has helped me through everything, he took time out of his day to help me which I am very thankful for.

Now I just had a quick question that hopefully I can get an answer to. So I have everything put together for my laser projector and I just needed to get windows XP on a laptop so I can use the ishow software. Well yesterday I was finally able to get windows XP installed on a VM and it works perfect. Thing is my 50mw laser died somehow and I have no idea what happened to it.

Luckily I have a 100mw lab style laser and I just need to know where I should solder the wires onto the circuit board that was connected to the 50mw laser.



So here is the picture of the circuit board. The 50mw laser was connected to the pins but now I need to know where to solder the 100mw laser. There is a brown and blue wire coming out of the 100mw. Brown is hot and blue is neutral I am pretty sure.

I tested the pins with a multimeter but I am still not sure where I should solder the wires. As you can see I labeled the pins inside the red and green thing only put out about 3V

When I measure pin 1 and 4 I got about 10.65V. When I measure pin 1 and 5 I get 0V. Pins 2 and 3 Im pretty sure are 2-3V from what I remember. I used the DCV 20 setting on the multimeter.

Also you can slightly see underneath the pin 2 it says CN1 and I tried googling the pinout for a CN1 and I am not getting too much info but from what I have found the pinouts are different for each site I visit so I cant trust that.

I would really appreciate an answer


Thanks you very much

[FlutterPie]

Im sorry for the quick bump but I really just wanted to get this done tonight to see if it works. Anyone know where to solder the wires?

[RichieR]

CN1 means connector 1.

It is not a description of what needs to be plugged in there.

I don't know how much help anyone here is going to be without some schematics - or photos showing what and where everything was previously plugged in.

[steve-o]

^ Yes.
.. and, you can't swap one laser head with another without knowing the wiring arrangements. Wire colors, connector numbers, pin numbers vary widely from one brand to the next and even within same brand. Was the previous laser the same kind as the one that you want to connect to this circuit board? Even if they were compatible I doubt if this 50mw driver will power the 100mw head.

[absolom7691]

Unfortunately, this is not as simple as replacing a light bulb. You need to know how much current your prvious laser head was drawing, how much current your replacement laser head requires and then see if the driver can even supply the power. The only thing I can suggest is to buy a generic laser driver e.g. P3 driver from dr. lava or a dual driver from Badpip. Those can drive a wide range of lasers from 1mW up to 1W or more (provided the laser has no active cooling) and are fully adjustable. This is why it is always best to buy a laser that has a driver with it especially when getting into larger lasers that have active cooling, temperature and light feedback loops. Again, your best shot here is to figure out how much current the other laser was drawing and see if the PSU will drive the replacement or just buy a generic driver.

[cemsolak]

@FlutterPie, to be able to comprehend this, you need to draw a rough schematic but just looking at the tracks and the components, simple voltage levels can give you a clue at times but most of time they are misleading. As you can probably understand incomplete information is probably worse than having none at all, same is the case in this scenario. Secondly, you can't just replace the laser. To able to do that you need to go through a process of educated guessing. That means that, see the components placed on the board, directly connected to the laser and see their datasheets. From the datasheets, you can guess what would most probably be the rating of the laser and replace it with the one having almost exact specs.