Laser Noob: Getting Started With The K40 Laser

September 27, 2018 by Adam Fabio 77 Comments

Why spend thousands on a laser cutter/engraver when you can spend as little as $350 shipped to your door? Sure it’s not as nice as those fancy domestic machines, but the plucky K40 is the little laser that can. Just head on down to Al’s Laser Emporium and pick one up. Yes, it sounds like a used car dealership ad, but how far is it from the truth? Read on to find out!

Laser cutting and engraving machines have been around for decades. Much like 3D printers, they were originally impossibly expensive for someone working at home. The closest you could get to a hobbyist laser was Epilog laser, which would still cost somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000 for a small laser system. A few companies made a go with the Epilog and did quite well – notably Adafruit used to offer laptop laser engraving services.

Over the last decade or so things have changed. China got involved, and suddenly there were cheap lasers on the market. Currently, there are several low-cost laser models available in various power levels. The most popular is the smallest – a 40-watt model, dubbed the K40. There are numerous manufacturers and there have been many versions over the years. They all look about the same though: A blue sheet metal box with the laser tube mounted along the back. The cutting compartment is on the left and the electronics are on the right. Earlier versions came with Moshidraw software and a parallel interface.

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DIY laser rifle doing damage long distance

DIY Long Distance Laser Telescope Does Some Damage

August 31, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 44 Comments

Here’s a DIY laser rifle which can explode a balloon at around 150 feet (45 meters) as well as some angry chemicals at a similar distance. Since there are plenty of videos of lasers doing that at around a meter, why shouldn’t doing so farther away be easy? Despite what many expect, laser beams don’t remain as straight lines forever. All light diverges over a distance. This makes it hard to create a laser which can do damage from more than around a meter and is why most demonstrations on YouTube are that distance or less.

[Styropyro’s] handheld, DIY laser rifle, or Laser Telescope Blaster as he calls it, works for long distances. His solution lies in some surprising physics: the larger the diameter of the beam, the more slowly it will diverge. So he used the opposite of a Galilean telescope to take the small beam of his 405-nanometer laser and increase its diameter. His best result was to explode a balloon at 150 feet (45 meters).

He did run into another issue first though. Anyone who’s tried to keep a camera aimed at a target through a telephoto lens while holding the camera in their hands knows that even a tiny movement will throw the camera off target. For a laser beam to sufficiently heat up the balloon in order to make it explode, the beam has to stay on it for a short period of time. But at a long distance, small movements of his rifle made the beam wander. Putting the rifle on a tripod fixed that. In the video below you can see him work through his design and these issues to finally get his big success.

We can guess what spurred on this interest in long-distance laser rifles. Back in July, a Chinese company made bold claims to building one which could do damage at 800 meters.

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Science Shows Green Lasers Might Be More Than You Bargained For

August 31, 2018 by Dan Maloney 54 Comments

This may come as a shock, but some of those hot screaming deals on China-sourced gadgets and goodies are not all they appear. After you plunk down your pittance and wait a few weeks for the package to arrive, you just might find that you didn’t get exactly what you thought you ordered. Or worse, you may get a product with unwanted ~~bugs~~ features, like some green lasers that also emit strongly in the infrared wavelengths.

Sure, getting a free death ray in addition to your green laser sounds like a bargain, but as [Brainiac75] points out, it actually represents a dangerous situation. He knows whereof he speaks, having done a thorough exploration of a wide range of cheap (and not so cheap) lasers in the video below. He explains that the paradox of an ostensibly monochromatic source emitting two distinct wavelengths comes from the IR laser at the heart of the diode-pumped solid state (DPSS) laser inside the pointer. The process is only about 48% efficient, meaning that IR leaks out along with the green light. The better quality DPSS laser pointers include a quality IR filter to remove it; cheaper ones often fail to include this essential safety feature. What wavelengths you’re working with are critical to protecting your eyes; indeed, the first viewer comment in the video is from someone who seared his retina with a cheap green laser while wearing goggles only meant to block the higher frequency light.

It’s a sobering lesson, but an apt one given the ubiquity of green lasers these days. Be safe out there; educate yourself on how lasers work and take a look at our guide to laser safety. Continue reading “Science Shows Green Lasers Might Be More Than You Bargained For” →

Laser Arm Cannon Scares More Than Metroids

August 30, 2018 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

There’s an interesting side effect of creating a popular piece of science fiction: if you wait long enough, say 30 or 40 years, there’s a good chance that somebody will manage to knock that pesky “fiction” bit off the end. That’s how we got flip phones that looked like the communicators from Star Trek, and rockets that come in for a landing on a tail of flame. Admittedly it’s a trick that doesn’t always work, but we’re not in the business of betting against sufficiently obsessed nerds either.

Coming in right on schedule 32 years after the release of Metroid on the Nintendo Entertainment System, we now have a functional laser arm cannon as used by the game’s protagonist Samus Aran, courtesy of [Hyper_Ion]. It’s not quite as capable as its video game counterpart, but if your particular corner of the solar system is under assault from black balloons you should be in good shape. Incidentally no word yet on a DIY Power Suit that folds the wearer up into a tiny ball, but no rush on that one.

Modeled after the version of the weapon Samus carried in 2002’s iconic Metroid Prime, [Hyper_Ion] 3D printed the cannon in a number of pieces that screw together in order to achieve the impressive final dimensions. He printed it at 0.3 mm layers to speed up the process, but as you can probably imagine, printing life-size designs like this is not for the faint of heart or short of time. While the use of printed threads does make the design a bit more complex, the fact that the cannon isn’t glued together and can be broken down for maintenance or storage is a huge advantage.

Ever popular NeoPixel strips give the cannon a bit of flash, and a speaker driven by a 2N2222 transistor on an Arduino Nano’s digital pin allows for some rudimentary sound effects with nothing more than a PWM signal. In the video after the break you can see how the lights and sounds serve as a warning system for the laser itself, as the cannon can be seen “charging up” for a few seconds before emitting a beam.

Of course, this is the part of the project that might have some readers recoiling in horror. To provide some real-world punch, [Hyper_Ion] has equipped his arm cannon with a 2.5W 450nm laser module intended for desktop engraving machines. To say this thing is dangerous is probably an understatement, so we wouldn’t blame you if you decided to leave the laser module off your own version. But it certainly looks cool, and as long as you’ve got some proper eye protection there’s (probably) more dangerous things you can do in the privacy of your own home.

Shame this kind of technology wasn’t really practical back when [Ryan Fitzpatrick] made this fantastic Power Suit helmet for a Metroid fan production.

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Finding The Linear In A Laser

August 4, 2018 by Jenny List 12 Comments

If your path has taken you through any work with hi-fi audio, you will be aware of the effects of distortion on sound quality. The tiniest non-linearity in a component can ruin the result, and people who work at the extreme end of the hi-fi spectrum will go to impossible lengths to chase the tiniest percentages of distortion that no human could possibly hear.

[Monta Elkins] has a Boldport kit, the Lite2Sound, which as its name suggests translates a light level to an audio signal. Given a laser diode and a source of country music from his Amazon Echo then, perhaps he could transmit the sound across a beam of laser light. And given that the Lite2Sound is an all-analogue device so unless it incorporates a low-pass filter it might struggle with PWM, to achieve that feat he would have to modulate the country music directly onto the laser light.

In the video below he shows us how he characterised his laser diode by plotting its VI curve on an oscilloscope, and identified its most linear region. He was then able to supply a voltage in the middle of that region, and simply overlay the line level audio from the Echo through an RC network. The result is a successful transmission of music via laser that sounds OK, though we’d find it interesting to see what an audio analyser would make of it. We’d also be interested to know whether the VI curve also maps to the same profile in the light intensity, we suspect the answer would be “close enough”.

So laser wireless audio can be done, and anyone who points out that the same feat could have been achieved with Bluetooth is spoiling the fun. After all, what’s a hi-fi without Frickin’ lasers!

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Shining A Light On Hearing Loss

July 26, 2018 by Brian McEvoy 16 Comments

When auditory cells are modified to receive light, do you see sound, or hear light? To some trained gerbils at University Medical Center Göttingen, Germany under the care of [Tobias Moser], the question is moot. The gerbils were instructed to move to a different part of their cage when administrators played a sound, and when cochlear lights were activated on their modified cells, the gerbils obeyed their conditioning and went where they were supposed to go.

In the linked article, there is software which allows you to simulate what it is like to hear through a cochlear implant, or you can check out the video below the break which is not related to the article. Either way, improvements to the technology are welcome, and according to [Tobias]: “Optical stimulation may be the breakthrough to increase frequency resolution, and continue improving the cochlear implant”. The first cochlear implant was installed in 1964 so it has long history and a solid future.

This is not the only method for improving cochlear implants, and some don’t require any modified cells, but [Tobias] explained his reasoning. “I essentially took the harder route with optogenetics because it has a mechanism I understand,” and if that does not sound like so many hackers who reach for the tools they are familiar with, we don’t know what does. Revel in your Arduinos, 555 timers, transistors, or optogenetically modified cells, and know that your choice of tool is as powerful as the wielder.

Optogenetics could become a hot ticket at bio maker spaces. We have talked about optogenetics in lab rodents before, but it also finds purchase in zebrafish and roundworm.

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Chinese Laser AK-47: Myth Or Reality?

July 9, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 164 Comments

Chinese company ZKZM Laser has produced the ZKZM-500 laser assault rifle which people are calling the Chinese AK-47 because of its similar size, weighing in at three kilos (6.6 lbs). Claims of its capabilities, however, are being disputed.

The South China Morning Post writes that the company claims the laser to:

be powered by a rechargeable lithium battery back,
have a range of 800 meters (0.5 miles),
have a beam that is invisible to the eye,
be able to fire 1000 “shots”, each no longer than two seconds,
be able to burn human flesh if held in place long enough,
be able to set fire to clothes and hair, and
be able to set fire to banners from a distance.

Burning things with lasers is nothing new but the disputes are mostly based around such a small laser being effective at an 800 meter range. To be fair, while the 800 meter range claim is everywhere, the Post writes that the company brochure says the range is 500 meters (0.3 miles), still quite a long distance.

[styropyro], a YouTuber with a lot of experience with lasers has done an analysis, starting by deducing a wavelength of around 2000 nanometers. He finds that at 800 meters the beam would have dispersed to a diameter of 26 cm (10 inches) and produce 53 W over that area. (EDIT: The 53 W is how much sunlight would produce for that area. In the video he carries the calculations further to work out the minimum power needed, ignoring losses, to light the cotton on fire, 645 W.) For 500 meters, using the same formula we calculate that the dispersion would be a diameter of 16 cm (6 inches) with 500 W spread over that area, which would get uncomfortable very fast, think of half a square meter of sunlight focused down to a circle of that diameter. (EDIT: Again, this it 500 W for sunlight, the laser produces more.) His video doesn’t include enough detail for us to replicate the remainder of the calculations so we’ll just have to go with the 800 meter claim. See the video below for his full analysis. If anyone else has any experience that’ll either support or dispute the claims then please share it with us in the comments.

After all the disputes against their claim, the Chinese company did produce a video firing the laser from a shorter distance. Check it out on this page by the post.

While waiting to see how much truth there is to the Chinese company’s claims we can sit back and enjoy [styropyro’s] home-brew high power ruby laser, both his build and him doing some serious damage with it.

Oh, and don’t try this at home. It’s probably in violation of the Geneva Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in addition to common sense.

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