I Got Da Blues

[clickamouse]

Greetings, all;

I am in between projects right now, so I’m trying to get caught up on documenting some of my recent builds.

I’m doing a first major upgrade to Brewster, my beer keg laser (full name: Beer, Light: Brewster), replacing the dual 445 4W system with a single 465nm unit running at 3W. This will match a Goldenstar 635nm 3W and a 2W LaserWave 532 for full RGBness. More on Brewster to come, but here is the 465 subsystem:



Based on the NUBMO7E, available from DTR (https://sites.google.com/site/dtrlpf...nm-laser-diode), this features a Flexmod P3 from Dr. Lava and a Pango Lasorb. The hand-crafted aluminum mount has a 30mm beam height, which matches the rest of the system.



Beam correction is provided by a 6X lens pair from CDBeam. This was originally used with a red diode in a lumia projector – I decided that correction was not needed for lumia, so I re-purposed it as you see. Bob machined a groove into plexi to hold the lenses in alignment. Originally twice as tall, the lenses were cut in half using my tile saw with a diamond blade – so now I have another pair for the next project. You can see the slightly rough edges on top of the lenses. The lenses are glued into place with epoxy. The original design had a top piece which clamped the lenses into place; this I flipped around to provide the right height for the corrector (plus a bit of an aluminum shim to get it exactly right).

This replaces the original blue:



This consists of 2 2W 445nm modules from DTR, combining via PBS after wave plating, TECs all around (controlled by the crude PWM module in the upper right).

I decided to see how well the new unit works without a TEC: The unit is massively heat-sunk via its ¼” base plate, which is thermal greased to the main baseplate, which has massive fins sticking out of it. And everything is hung upside-down, so the heat will rise to the fins to be cooled by a bunch of fans. Details forthcoming as I finish the upgrade and post the Brewster story.



The beam is around 5mm @ 1M with a slight oval shape; it also sports slight wings top and bottom. These will be clipped by my 5mm galvo mirrors (DT-40s).



I love the color and the price/power ratio can’t be beat. When finances are available, I would like to replace all my 445s with these.

Cheers…Mike

[Draco]

i cant wait to see how you made the blue section, it looks really neat