lightspace ascent-x series

[drm916]

Yeah, but isn't a heatsink good enough for a diode already?

And again, doesnt masking a wide beam reduce brightness? How much? Seems like not so much if you guys are doing it.

You would be masking the wings. Not the main beam.

[blue]

Thanks. Then I guess my question is how much of the overall power do the wings contain.

[norty303]

Its irrelevant as we don't want the wings anyway. They make the beam look fuzzy to the eye and overspill other wavelengths on graphics.

As for cooling, i see people going to unnecessary lengths here to use TEC cooling. Only when you start to get larger arrays and are driving diodes hard with CW-like modulation do you need to consider active cooling (imho).
You can go a long way with good passive cooling setups.

The issue with reds is a lot to do with heat and wavelength shift, thr other wavelengths don't really suffer the same as badly.

[daction]

I guess that hot glue shortage that was predicted a few years ago has finally happened.

[blue]

Its irrelevant as we don't want the wings anyway. They make the beam look fuzzy to the eye and overspill other wavelengths on graphics.

I totally understand.
But what about beam shows? The beam just seems a bit fatter.
And the overspill effect isn't so bad when projecting abstract shows. (The audience can't tell if the red around the white/yellow/orange is an intentional abstract effect or a poor hardware artifact, they aren't looking at the show with laserist's eyes, hehe. And with violet mix its pretty hard to notice).
Still, if the wings are something like 15% of the power I'll cut them. But if it's more than that's dimming the visibility of my red beams in my beam shows...

And you're not only one thinking people people take TEC/active cooling too seriously. I think planters explains this in one of his videos. I think he even tested how temperature affected red diode wavelengths in one of his videos where I think he controlled the temps of red diodes to merge the slightly different wavelengths with some kind of wizardry. The difference wasn't that huge if I remember right but I'll need to find the video again.

I guess that hot glue shortage that was predicted a few years ago has finally happened.

Do we really need glue if the parts are properly secured in place with set screws?

[norty303]

It was beam shows that I was referring to being fuzzy.
When I added my masking I actually did it whilst projecting test frames. The difference and crispness was amazing.
I doubt you'd tell the difference in brightness compared side by side but you'd see the difference in beam quality.

[swamidog]

It was beam shows that I was referring to being fuzzy.
When I added my masking I actually did it whilst projecting test frames. The difference and crispness was amazing.
I doubt you'd tell the difference in brightness compared side by side but you'd see the difference in beam quality.

can you post pics of what you did?

[blue]

Thanks for the info.
I only now noticed you said you added a tape to cylindrical lenses. I don't have such lenses. I misread that you just added tape on the module's aperture. I agree filtering the remaining feathers after the beam is squished horizontally as much as possible with lenses won't affect brightness much.

[norty303]

The wings are in the vertical plane if you're using cylinders.
Swami, I think my FB page is in my signature, my latest 3W diode build pics show the BlackTak on the cylinders. On my phone at the moment and just off to bed

[norty303]

The beam is actually expanded in the horizontal by the cylinders. This is the fast axis, the expansion decreases the divergence.