Hello everyone!
I'm looking at laser diodes for engraving wood/cutting vinyl sheets.
i'm aimed at 445/450 nm laser diodes because it is what i can source for relatively cheap, and
we've determined in this thread that it's good enough for what i want to do.
So the question now is how to chose such lasers, are there specific things that i should be looking for?
most of the ones i see comes with a TTL driver board (as an example
this one is 2.5W with TTL only), some comes with PWM (example 2 :
this one is "true" 2.3W, with TTL AND PWM) on top of that.
On one product page, i saw that TTL was to turn on and off, and PWM was to select the power. I thought that TTL was just a signal type, that could also be pulsed with PWM to select the duty cycle?
I also find products like this one :
1000-1500 mW laser diode in 405nm, which is dirt cheap, but doesn't seem to come with any control board. I supose that those diodes need a very specific tension and current to work. Am i wrong here?
Do you think that it would be better to source such a raw module, and search for a driver board separately? or perhaps go even more DiY, and buy a
raw laser diode module such as this one, find a suitable heatsink, add the driver board and go on?
(i think that in all cases, if i can find higher powered laser diodes for cheap i'll consider this route on top of buying a pre-made module, and perhaps design a better heatsink, using watercooling)
All in all, i tend to find 3 types of modules :
- raw diodes, or diodes with only heatsink;
- complete modules with a rectangular driver board that goes on the side of the laser module;
- complete modules with a smaller square driver board that goes on the top of the heatsink fan.
Since most of the times, chinese manufacturers mass produce a few of the same circuits, i suspect that most if not all of the modules in this price range are
those options, or a slight variant. Meaning that i could get some returns for people using those (or knwowing them) : so
what do you think of those models, if you have something ressmebling?
And if you don't have any of those, but know the field,
what would you recommend? what to look for? any insight at all?
My goal is not to have THE laser, but have something correct enough to get started, learn about it. I feel like that it will be the same as for my aquariums, 3D printers, or electronics stuff :
i'll start with one, and will want multiple ones later on to adapt to more use cases
PS : i hope the links are not considered spam, i link those to illustrate what i mean; also those are not necessarily the best ones i can find on chinese provides, but are representative of what i find.
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/30/2018 10:15AM by sky99.