Many of us in childhood wanted to have a real laser. We bought laser pointers, but they didn't look like powerful Jedi swords at all. A cheap laser with a bunch of nozzles did not burn through plastic or paper and did not shine for hundreds of meters during the day. However, time has passed, and now you can make your childhood dream a reality with your own hands.
Instructions
Step 1
Disassemble the DVD drive (you can take an old one, but a working one) To do this, remove the cover and expose the control board. Turn the drive over, remove the aluminum cover, and remove the screws. Disconnect the cables and remove the diodes and optics, breaking off the protection. Take out the cooling diode, tie a wire around its legs and solder a capacitor to them. Remove it from the drive.
Step 2
Solder an elementary driver from a cell phone battery or three batteries, a button and a resistor. Resistor resistance for a 16X drive will be approximately 2 ohms. You can buy it or find it on the drive board. You will also need a 100 nF capacitor, which can also be found on the drive board (round orange parts marked with 104).
Step 3
Use a laser pointer as an optic. This will make the beam 5mm in diameter. It's a lot. But for this, nozzles were invented. The native optics of the drive will work well, but they have their own problems, because due to the small focal length, it will be difficult to adjust the focus. But with a successful outcome, you will get a beam with a diameter of 1 mm.
Step 4
If nothing worked with the optics of the drive, choose a lens for the optics that will help convert the light flow into a parallel beam of the diameter you need. Install the lens so that the laser diode is at the focal length of this lens, otherwise there will be no result.
Step 5
Please note that the elementary driver of your pointer will not stabilize the current, but only limit it, therefore, the laser will turn into a flashlight. The more discharged the batteries, the dimmer the light. But it is difficult to determine when the batteries decided to sit down, because the pointer to the eye is always bright. So as soon as it stops melting the bags, then it's time to put it on recharge. This is a relatively small drawback with such an elementary "filling" of the driver itself.
