I finally received the BDR-S06J sleds and extracted the diodes from them. These diodes emit light at a wavelength of 405nm and go up to at least 500mA, where they put out about 600mWatts of power! That’s not bad.
To drive these I needed a new driver. I was going to go with the FlexModP3 but after waiting for several weeks for my order I ended up building my own. I built a driver based on the StanHam design. I added a beefier output transistor and SMT components that I could source. I’ll talk about this more in a future post.
To show off the new laser wrote a short script that parses a gerber file from Kicad and produces a g-code file for EMC. This allows me to create a stencil for SMT work at the office. The result in paper was quite good!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ObB2h40IVY&w=480&h=390]
I’ll need to find a suitable material to cut, Mylar is the way to go apparently. I’m hoping that overhead projector sheets will work.
