industrial barcode scanners for parts: lenses, TEC, photodiode, sevo mirror, etc

[drlava]

I recently stopped by an industrial surplus sale and picked up some of these little 'Lazerdata 9000e' industrial super high speed barcode scanners. They are intended for inventory and assembly tracking on an automated assembly line and would you believe back in '97 they retailed for $3000 each. They can read much more than UPC label codes, see the manual for more info.
I tested out each one and it's reading barcodes and sending them to the rs232 port.

Inside is a gold plated hexagonal spinning mirror that could be used for 'liquid sky' effects or other experiements you can come up with. Its speed can be adjusted via a pot on the PCB. There is a tiny little TEC that cools a 9mm laser diode and mount which is electrically isolated with nylon screws. The laser is collimated with a multi-element coated glass lens of high quality. Also there is a aspherical lens of very high numerical aperture that is focused through a removeable IR filter onto a high speed photodiode sensor.

On the control side there are many FET op amps and some high speed op amps including a 150MHz amp (for the photodiode sensor.) There is a data processing logic control board which hosts a hitachi HD647180x microcontroller fed by 2Mb AM28f020 flash ROM. Also a 1Mb fifo buffer, tms320C31 DSP, and a XC3130a FPGA, along with RAM (they were really serious about high speed scanning).

Power requirements are +/- 12V, 5V And can be fed into the unit via a VGA cable.
It's all housed in a red anodized aluminum case with AR coated window.

Here are some pics







asking $35 each + shipping

[thesk8nmidget]

whoa those are really neat!

but you broke the warranty

[andy_con]

diode wavelength and power?

[keeperx]

im gonna guess a <10mw 650.

[gottaluvlasers]

i am pretty sure that almost ALL barcode scanners fall into the "eyesafe" Class 1 limits. so, <1mW. i may be wrong, but im pretty sure that is the case.

-Marc

[drlava]

yep it's <5mW 650nm laser. The first thing I'd do to this if I were going to use it for laser effects not scanning, is to get a 9-5.6mm adapter from meredith instruments and mount a high power red in there.

[sugeek]

That looks pretty neat, you motivated me to pull an old scanner out of the junk box to tear apart tonight (not a nice as these by any means).

[aXit]

Hey drlava.

Would you be able to give me a figure on the size of that TEC? Thickness would be useful too.

What power rails would be required to run the motor just by itself? Is the motor control circuit removable or even separate?

What would it cost to ship it to Sydney, Australia?

Thanks.

[jeejeedr]

You also may want to search for this thing:


this is an accu sort 24i. It has a decent housing you can use (extruded alu) and a great ld mount with tec cooling and a triple glass lens assembly attached to the ld mount.
An big fs mirror, a small fs mirror on a small mount, hexagonal mirror, ...

[aXit]

Nah, I was only going to rip it down for parts anyway, the accu-sorts are up in the hundreds.

A small TEC is one of the major components I was looking for, and that's why this interested me.

Still no reply from drlava...